The Founding of the Eclipse BIRT Project

Actuate is one of the first enterprise software companies to make a strategic commitment to open source for its core technology and the future of its product line and overall business.
Actuate founded and now co-leads 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. The BIRT project’s goal was to bring the web design metaphor to creating visualizations of structured data.

Actuate founded the BIRT project because it realized that it was time to innovate its product line for the third time by 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 resulting from the participation of a community of developers.

BIRT Today

Today, BIRT is one of the most widely adopted BI and reporting technologies with millions of downloads and 750,000 developers. It also has a large, active and growing developer community representing all types of organizations. It is licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL). Major technology companies such as IBM, Cisco, S1 and ABS Nautical Systems have incorporated BIRT into their product lines. To learn more about Eclipse BIRT, its features and users, visit our community site for BIRT, www.birt-exchange.org.

BIRT and the Actuate Product Line

Today, the complete Actuate product line draws on BIRT as a key component. ActuateOne, Actuate’s premier product suite, leverages BIRT as its sole design environment for building Business Intelligence Applications and information applications. The BIRT Performance Scorecard application from Actuate embeds BIRT to distribute KPIs and Metrics to the enterprise, and the Xenos Enterprise Server transforms legacy documents and data that can be fed into BIRT.

In the spirit of open source, each Actuate product line has a vital community of users and partners that participate in online community sites to help each other succeed with Actuate products.