Actian APAC vice president of sales and service, Jason Leonidas.
Australian customers who want to develop automated business intelligence (BI) smartphone applications will be able to next year using a Cloud platform created by Actian Corporation, formerly known as Ingres.
Developers can use the platform to create apps that will analyse data from a variety of data sources, define triggers for priority data and deliver actions when data events occur.
However, the platform known as Cloud Action will not be available in Australia until Q1 of 2012. Customers can develop apps for the iOS and Android operating systems. Actian APAC vice president of sales and service, Jason Leonidas, said this was because the company needed time to prepare its customers, who include Qantas and the Port of Melbourne, for the launch of the service.
“We are building the platform that enables organisations to deploy these apps,” he said. “Our partners, independent software vendors, end customers and system integrators will be welcome to develop the applications that sit on the platform."
For example, Leonidas said a customer might have an in-house manufacturing system that would require the management team to look at outstanding orders. Using the app system meant that the managers could use their iPhone to download an order status.
“It could be interfaced through to my core enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in the back office so I may want to deploy the ERP vendor smartphone application, whether it is SAP, Oracle or Microsoft,” he said.
“Because I have an integrated Cloud Action platform that enables access back into the core systems, they can plug whatever iPhone app they want into that piece of standardised, secure infrastructure.”
The company has 400 Australian customers including Qantas, Port of Melbourne, ING Sydney and the Australian Electoral Commission; all use the Ingris database system to run critical support services.
He added that the company would be hiring more business development managers and pre-sale solution architects in January and February of 2012 to coincide with the Action Cloud platform launch. The US-headquartered company has a Melbourne head office along with presences in Sydney, Queensland and Perth.
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