Search online for “difficult jobs” and the lists you get are predictable: Firefighters, emergency room doctors, police officers, crab fishermen and coal miners usually make the cut. I’d add another entry to that list: enterprise software buyer.
Why? Because people who buy enterprise software have countless competing needs to balance. A lot of those needs come from the technical side (obviously), and when the software in question is used to design and deliver embedded analytics, they include:
- Throughput to handle large volumes of data that arrives at high, often unpredictable speeds.
- Scalability to grow as data volume and velocity inevitably increase. No business wants to – or can afford to – outgrow its software.
- Stability in the face of heavy workloads over extended periods of time. A software package that isn’t reliable will frustrate users and cost more.
An enterprise software buyer who gets one (or more) of these things wrong can find hordes of angry people banging at their door. Or worse, they’ll find that they don’t have a door to bang on at all (if you catch my drift). Still, it’s rare to find all three of those attributes in a single software product.
To prove that BIRT iHub is the rare software package that meets enterprise needs for throughput, scalability and stability, Actuate’s quality assurance engineers pushed the software – and pushed it hard. Using both bare metal and virtual servers, they ran performance tests to see how well BIRT iHub generated complicated reports in large scheduled batches. To check the software’s handling of peak loads, they tested BIRT iHub’s ability to generate and display many pages of reports on demand. They also explored whether the software could run uninterrupted at high volume for an extended period of time without manual intervention.
Their work is captured in a new Actuate White Paper, Delivering Extreme BIRT iHub Performance, now available for free download. The paper describes the test design and architecture, details the specific test scenarios that our engineers ran, and shares the results. The impressive numbers produced by BIRT iHub included linear scaling in batch job production as servers were added to a cluster.
Yes, that purple bar shows that a six-node BIRT iHub cluster generated more than 14,000 pages per second. How does that compare with your peak needs? BIRT iHub’s extreme performance explains why leading financial institutions rely on Actuate for reporting, statement generation, and other high-volume needs. It also demonstrates why Actuate is expanding its reach in telecom, the Internet of Things (IoT), transportation, mobile app development, and other markets that deliver embedded analytics to millions of users.
If you’re an enterprise software buyer in one of those markets, hats off to you. We hope Delivering Extreme BIRT iHub Performance makes your difficult job easier. Download it for free today.