In 2004, Actuate was one of the first Enterprise Software companies to make a strategic commitment to open source for its core technology and for the future of its product-line and overall business. Actuate realized that it was time to innovate for the third time in bringing compelling, navigable, interactive intuitive reporting and data visualizations to business applications.

At the same time, Actuate recognized three key significant trends emerging in the software industry:

More Sophisticated, Interactive  Graphics for Online Information Visualization

Google, Amazon, and Yahoo have changed user expectations for what information looks like on the Web and now, with the advent of Web 2.0 and Rich Internet Applications, the expectation for that information to be highly interactive and for the viewer to be able to enjoy the experience has increased.

Web Design Metaphor

The process of designing web pages created a new standard in how to lay out and develop documents. The new community of developers needed an alternative to the traditional banded-report writers.

Open Source

The emergence of open source as a method of developing, distributing and licensing software in order to achieve the innovation, accelerated development cycle and market-demanded feature-set was created due to the participation of a community of developers.

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The Eclipse BIRT Project

In 2004, Actuate founded and is now co-leading the BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) open source project with the Eclipse Foundation, the home of the open source Eclipse Development Framework, the leading IDE worldwide. This project’s goal was to bring the web design metaphor to creating visualizations of structured data. Major technology companies such as IBM, Cisco, S1 and ABS Nautical Systems have incorporated BIRT into their product lines.

The BIRT Product Line from Actuate

Actuate offers a BIRT-based product line that adds value to Eclipse BIRT implementations that have special requirements, whether embedded, departmental, or mission critical. These products add Flash visualizations into applications developed using BIRT open source reporting, improve the user's experience viewing and interacting with BIRT web pages, supply special-purpose data access approaches, add scheduling, security, document management and finally reliability, performance and scalability features for enterprise implementations.

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Want to learn more?

To get more information about open source, please contact an Actuate expert at 1-800-884-8665 (US & Canada) or contact us by email or visit our BIRT community site BIRT-Exchange.com.