Business intelligence, on your smartwatch
Smartwatches are still quite a new concept to most, but tech companies are already looking at how they can use this sort of wearable tech in business.
Pete Cittadini, president and CEO of Actuate showed off the latest version of the company's core Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool (BIRT) iHub product, 3.1, which now offers visualisation software on mobile devices, including Android, so that users can access their data from anywhere.
BIRT Analytics 5.0: The company demonstrated version 5.1 which the company said should be out by year end.
At the same time, the company announced BIRT Analytics 5.0 which provides an advanced analytics engine, "allowing business analysts to explore and blend their data to find hidden relationships without the need for IT", the company said.
Cittadini said it is better to take the embedded applications route "because you can take baby steps which are economically feasible." This means you can, "embed better intelligence into pre-existing applications [and] that is obviously a much better alternative than replacing them all which is both expensive and speculative," he said.
The company was demonstrating a number of things including its Wear API which allows you to embed the software into any Android device, including watches. The company ran a demonstration that showed data that started in on a screen on a car dashboard which was then rendered on a smartwatch and then was moved on again to a global application.
As Actuate sees it the Internet of Things is one of the key growth areas for new applications. According to the company, the new features in BIRT iHub 3.1 allows development teams to "simplify the process of creating and deploying data driven apps with a REST API by embedding BIRT content in mobile and Web applications". Also, it allows user to incorporate data visualisation from third-party libraries of charts and graphs with BIRT outputs.
The new capabilities in BIRT Analytics 5.0 will let analysts access enriched data or intelligence from BIRT Analytics that can be embeded into existing applications with a public API the company said. They believe that will help users when they are looking for those hidden insights needed for forecasts or predictions.
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