Industry Analysts Praise Actuate 9 for its Collaborative Reporting Architecture

Analysts Expect Actuate 9 to Reduce Report Development Burden on IT and Dramatically Increase Adoption of Business Intelligence Applications

South San Francisco, Calif. – June 27, 2006 – Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ: ACTU), the world leader in Enterprise Reporting and Performance Management Applications that empower 100% of users to achieve breakthrough corporate performance, today announced industry support for Actuate 9, an Enterprise Reporting Application Platform based on the world’s first Collaborative Reporting Architecture (See related announcement, “Actuate 9 Transforms Business Intelligence with the First Collaborative Reporting Architecture” 06.26.06.) The analysts cite Actuate’s innovative open source strategy and ability to foster report design collaboration among IT and end users as keys to achieving more efficient reporting and enabling widespread adoption of information.

AMR Research

“BI Vendor Actuate has ripped a page out of its open source playbook and brought the concept of a collaborative development methodology to its enterprise reporting suite…” said John Hagerty in the June 2006 AMR Research article “Actuate 9: Expanding the BI Footprint.”  “It sponsored the development of Eclipse BIRT, an open source reporting tool, in a move to foster adoption of its products—licensed and open source—through many communities…One model it’s taken to heart is open source’s collaborative development model, where individuals contribute their work for others to use. This is at the center of Actuate’s collaborative reporting model.  Different constituents—from architects to application developers to power and business users—all contribute components to iterative report and analysis design; this shared effort should ease any strain between diverse participants in the decision support process.”

Bloor Research

“Actuate 9 provides two major stepping stones. For existing customers it offers significant additional functionality, with the introduction of Business Reports providing long-awaited ad hoc query capabilities,” said Philip Howard, research director, Technology at Bloor Research. “On the other hand, for users of BIRT the ability to manage and serve BIRT reports from within the Actuate environment should prove attractive and Actuate should start to see a return on its investment in this open source project.” 

ComputerWire

"Many companies struggle to maintain a mountain of reports that often don't serve user needs," said Madan Sheina, principal analyst, BI Technologies at ComputerWire. "Having a smaller number of reports that can be sustained and evolved over time allows companies to more efficiently pool IT and business user resources to achieve sharper analysis. The Actuate Collaborative Reporting Architecture provides a flexible collaborative framework to streamline designs that tap into the knowledge of each user constituency to create fewer but more relevant reports."

IDC

"In order for business intelligence to truly enter the mainstream, IT must be able to implement end-user requested changes faster," said Dan Vesset, research director at IDC. "Many BI offerings have added end-user functionality without taking into consideration the added burden on IT. Actuate 9 introduces new report development functionality which leverages a single report design that is shareable and alterable throughout the development process. This approach speeds the turn-around time for reports and reduces the development burden on IT."

Ventana Research

"Two of the critical criteria organizations use when deciding to standardize on a BI vendor are breadth of functionality and ease of use," said Dan Everett, Research Director of business intelligence at Ventana Research. "Actuate 9 expands functionality beyond high volume reporting with a new semantic layer and web based interface for ad-hoc query. Furthermore, this release includes the Collaborative Reporting Architecture developed as part of the company's BIRT open source strategy, which enables responsibility for creating and managing report components to be distributed across IT and business users."

RedMonk

"The impact of open source on enterprise computing is undeniable, and business intelligence and reporting are the latest areas to benefit," said Stephen O'Grady, principal analyst at RedMonk. "By leveraging the open source BIRT project, Actuate is making BI available and relevant to entirely new communities of developers."

Actuate Collaborative Reporting Architecture

The Actuate Collaborative Reporting Architecture combines open source technologies and principle with the leading enterprise reporting application platform to provide the next generation business intelligence environment.  The new architecture enables dynamic, interactive enterprise reports for every type of deployment and delivers the first ad-hoc web reporting product that allows end–users and IT departments to collaborate on and evolve reports.

Actuate - the people behind BIRT

Actuate founded and continues to co-lead the Eclipse BIRT open source project. BIRT is the premier development environment for Rich Information Applications that present structured data and content in compelling and interactive ways via the web on any device. Actuate and its people are dedicated to making BIRT the best environment for our customers to develop Web 2.0 applications that drive revenue through higher customer satisfaction/loyalty and improve operational performance. The people of Actuate continually participate in and provide resources for the vibrant open source community that has emerged around BIRT. Anybody can participate in the BIRT movement by visiting www.birt-exchange.com.

Actuate offers value-add BIRT products and services that speed the development process and bring additional functionality such as, interactivity, content transformation and enterprise scalability to BIRT-based Rich Information Applications. Actuate has over 4,500 customers globally in a diverse range of business areas including financial services and the public sector. Founded in 1993, Actuate is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with offices worldwide. Actuate is listed on NASDAQ under the symbol ACTU. For more information, visit the company's web site at www.actuate.com.

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