Actuate Unveils Android Interface for BIRT BI

November 1, 2011 Alex Woodie

Open source business intelligence software developer Actuate last week unveiled a new interface for the most popular open source mobile operating system on the planet, Android. BIRT Mobile enables users to consume reports, dashboards, and other BI content from the comfort of their Android phones and tablets.

Actuate is a publicly traded company that develops the free and open source BIRT BI software. The company also sells ActuateOne, a commercial version of the Java-based BIRT that is supported by Actuate.

ActuateOne has supported iOS-based mobile devices for some time with both BIRT and ActuateOne, but the availability of BIRT Mobile for Android is special because of the commonality of open source, according to Actuate president and CEO Pete Cittadini.

“Our customers are demanding native Android support for BIRT,” Cittadini says in a press release. “Android, like BIRT, is widely used open source technology. As developers evaluate technologies to deploy mobile BI, BIRT is the logical choice.”

BIRT Mobile gives users access to a range of BI content, including reports, KPIs, documents, dashboards, tables, graphs, charts, visualization, and maps. The Android client is interactive, Acutate says, and comes preloaded with demonstration dashboards.

BIRT Mobile is a free product that works with the open source BIRT software, as well as ActuateOne. The software can display on mobile devices any content that can be served through the BIRT iServer. Customers running cloud-based BIRT environments (delivered as BIRT onDemand) can also use BIRT Mobile. In fact, BIRT Mobile comes preconfigured with a profile for BIRT onDemand.

The software works with any open source Eclipse or Actuate BIRT content, and is compatible with enterprise deployments of Actuate 11 SP2 and higher, the company says. For more information, see www.actuate.com.