July 30th, 2010 | 
Author: I was assigned by my company to research and evaluate the various business intelligence solutions currently on the market today. Our companies’ goal is to take our large sets of data and define it into segmented chunks of business intelligence that we can utilize for rapid decision making. I came across a few companies with provided high quality business intelligence reporting tools. I analyzed all of the companies based a three main requirements, which included ease of use, interface design and cost. One company in particular stood out from the rest in terms of usability and pricing, the companies name is Actuate. During my evaluation process, I took a look at their business intelligence web page. They have a wide variety of useful information about their business intelligence products and also have a dedicated community of collaborative open source developers that help maintain their software. I was excited about their offerings and decided to download the free trial version of the software from their website. I am currently trying out the software and plan on reporting my discoveries to my boss in the near future. Overall, if your interested in a set of business intelligence reporting tools that is very straight forward to use, I would recommended you try Actuate BIRT yourself. Also, if you’re into clouds computing they also have a SaaS BI solution.
