OpenText Magellan vs. Roambi (discontinued)

It depends on extensibility, set-up, access & style. Actuate performs fairly well, but has performance issues because it sits on top of eclipse, which sits on top of Java. Extensibility usually comes at that price. Set-up is fairly straightforward and it can be secured.

Incentivized

I would recommend Roambi for its ease-of-use and quick deployment. It is very visually rich and eye-catching, and I believe it is best suited for presenting business & finance dashboard to C-level management and sales representatives in the field. Because it can be accessed on the iPhone or iPad, it is very mobile and the Apple touch interfaces are nearly flawless. If an organization needs to really dig deep into their data, I would look elsewhere, as Roambi has certain limitations.

• Ability to connect to different kinds of sources, including web services, and customize those queries to the extend needed
• Provide tools to customize the look & feel of the reports as much as needed, even being able to choose different appearances for different outputs
• Allowing scripting in the reports extends the functionality available
• Allowing to embed reports without further licensing and maintaining all the functionality

Incentivized

• Very intuitive user interface that exploits the touch capabilities of tablets and smartphones very well.
• Offline capability - extremely helpful for sales people that can not always be online.
• Integration with existing BI solutions - almost all of our clients have already a BI Infrastructure. Roambi integrates very well.

• Report rendering can take a long time for large reports (250,000+ pages) - we run these in batch over night
• The deployment of production code from development to test to production enviroments can be complex due to the number of components that must compile

Incentivized

• The system that performs the rendering of data to the front-end can be improved to intelligently read the back end data template or at least the layout. Inserting new rows/columns of data completely messes up the rendering on the front end and the process of re-selecting information to ensure proper rendering is a very tedious one.
• Also, Roambi should have the capability to analyse information in formats other than excel such as word, ppts and/or pdfs. I found the lack of this capability a major hurdle because each time I had to export information into excel to render into a template.

I am no longer working for the company that was using Actuate but I believe they would continue to use it because the stitching costs would be to high. It would require a complete rewrite of the reports and the never version of Actuate (BIRT) even required an almost complete report rewrite

Incentivized

The only reason we would not renew is if there is something out there that is less expensive that is cross-platform for mobile devices. Our clients are no longer exclusively using iOS, so in order to keep their business, we need to change with them.

It is quite intuitive to use. It is fit specifically for doing sentiment, emotion, and intention analysis as well as text classification and text summarization. I would have given 10 if it is fit for the purpose of doing image processing and analysis as well. There is a huge market to analyze video and image data.

Incentivized

VERY easy to use. Only limited by how the graphs and data is initially set up.

Always there on the front and backend for us and the client.

It is vastly superior to these in many ways, for complex reporting it is a much more sophisticated solution. Visualizations are very good. Javascript extensibility is very powerful, others don't support this or as well. Pentaho and MS are both OLAP oriented. Pentaho is moving more toward big data, which was not our primary focus. Others are stuck in the Crystal Reports Band metaphor.

Comparing the mobile capabilities of both products - as of course, Tibco Spotfire is a complete solution whereas Roambi focuses on mobility. While some would argue that the ten View (template) limitation of Roambi works in favor of competitors, we have found this to be untrue. Users quickly get used to this native interfaces, which are found across the templates. Additionally, the ten available Views cover 99% of the types of reports or insights you'd ever need. If this is not the case, are you sure you are asking the right questions?

• Actuate can handle 50 to 60 sub reports inside a report very well.
• Dynamically creating the datasource, chart, graph, reports are the main advantages. We can do any level of drilling, and can create a performance matrix dashboard efficiently.

• positive ROI
• and any analytical tool needs more historical data for accurate analysis, in that case, roambi 's part is as a presenter can't influence the ROI exactly..
• overall objective its a value addition for sap based data analytics and others as well.
• for CIO or analytics people good tool to convince their business users and executives.

Incentivized