OpenText [NASDAQ: OTEX]: Rendering Seamless Analytical Insights

With calls for innovative change amidst shrinking budgets, government agencies must explore new ways to optimize costs, decrease inefficiency and increase productivity. The CIO’s office in government agencies is under pressure to do more with big data. Predictive analytical insights generated from the growing data quantity helps in better decision making. The myriad financial benefits of accessing and analyzing big data created in various facets of government operations have only just been discovered. Advances in technology and massive increases in available data have the potential to both challenge and transform the performances of various government projects.

San Mateo, CA based OpenText [NASDAQ: OTEX] offers federal developers scalability and security across any type of data and device, while increasing the efficiency of application development and deployment through OpenText Actuate Information Hub (formerly BIRT iHub). The personalized analytics and data visualization capabilities of iHub mine large structured and unstructured data sets to deliver real-time actionable insights to government projects. iHub provides users with information in context and makes data exploration a part of their day-to-day experience. iHub defines HTML5 visuals and data objects, stores, manages, and secures XML designs, and also embeds visualization. “iHub is a scalable analytics server platform. It enables IT leaders and their teams to design, deploy, and display secure interactive analytic applications, reports and dashboards fed by multiple data sources,” asserts Mark J. Barrenechea, CEO, OpenText.

iHub includes an integrated platform, OpenText Analytics and Reporting which helps in designing, deploying, and displaying analytics applications. It provides Federal IT with dashboards, reporting, and data visualization for large and complex applications. “The analytics and reporting platform’s certified, scalable architecture can integrate many data sources to support budget management, healthcare, performance management, and other efforts,” explains Barrenechea.

Data, whether big, small or somewhere in between, is only valuable when you can draw some meaningful conclusions from it

The process begins with the free OpenText Actuate Analytics Designer, a graphical drag and drop design tool and IDE. IT teams use Analytics Designer to create interactive applications, dashboards, actionable business reports, and templates for deployment on iHub. Content created with Analytics Designer can aggregate multiple enterprise data sources to present a unified, consistent view of important information and accelerate decision making.

For instance, a major government agency, which deals with transportation safety, integrated iHub to its existing systems and produced operational dashboards for instant, at-a-glance information integrated from multiple systems, operational and financial databases, and applications. Previously, the agency faced challenges involving cumbersome development, with limited data sources, and a poor system performance prevented analysis of real-time data. Using iHub they gained interactive insight into operational information and experienced rapid reduction of development timeframe. “BIRT (now iHub) has proven to be a flexible, secure and reliable solution, and will continue to be an important component of our information delivery strategy going forward,” says the Software Programs Manager of the government agency.

Driven by the growth of advanced analytics, mobile adoption, and increasingly sophisticated users, data has become a game changer when it comes to both commercial and government apps. Whether enterprises are focused on delivering insights from big data to the masses, or next-generation customer facing apps, it’s clear that providing personalized analytics and insights are critical to end-user adoption and the success of online initiatives. Importantly, collecting, storing and processing the data isn’t the complete journey. “Data, whether big, small or somewhere in between, is only valuable when you can draw some meaningful conclusions from it,” concludes Barrenechea.