Actuate Delivers First Open Source-based BI Tool for Report Developers Submitted by: Sarum PR Monday, 20 March 2006 Actuate BIRT 2.0 Allows Developers of Any Experience Level to Easily Build Complex Reports ECLIPSECON – Santa Clara, Calif. – March 20th , 2006 – Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ: ACTU), the world leader in Enterprise Reporting and Performance Management Applications, today announced the general availability of Actuate BIRT 2.0, an easy-to-use Business Intelligence and reporting tool. Actuate BIRT is based upon Eclipse BIRT, an open source reporting project that leverages a broad community of developers, commercial adopters, and interoperable top-level Eclipse projects. Built from the ground up for web applications, Actuate BIRT 2.0 was designed to deliver ease-of-use and flexibility to report developers, who are typically not Java coders, as well as the functional power to meet the complex reporting needs of the most sophisticated real-world applications. “Our statistical research on the acceptance of Open Source BI shows that the market now sees it as a viable alternative to commercial BI,” said Eric Rogge, vice president and research director at Ventana Research. “The market is quite willing to use both open source BI and commercial BI simultaneously.” “Many Business Intelligence tools are too expensive and don’t have the flexibility that developers want,” said Wayne Eckerson, director of research and services at The Data Warehousing Institute. “There will be a strong market for low-cost, highly flexible BI tools and open source BI tools are part of that trend." “By incorporating Eclipse BIRT 2.0 into our xProcess technology, we were able to cut the development time on the reporting functionality of xProcess from over a year to less than 120 days,” said Christopher Lank, CEO and President of Ivis (www.ivis.com). “As we introduce xProcess V2.0 embedded with Eclipse BIRT 2.0 to the market, we can foresee that the maintenance and support benefits of the BIRT 2.0 commercial version will prove attractive for our future customers.“ “With the release of Actuate BIRT 2.0, developers have a preferred and powerful alternative to non web-oriented ‘banded report writers,’ such as Crystal Reports,” said Mark Coggins, senior vice president of engineering at Actuate. “Report developers will now be able to benefit from a unique web-page design metaphor, import of styles from existing web site CSS files, report component re-use capabilities and access to an extensive collective knowledge base only possible with an open source-based technology. Actuate BIRT 2.0 will enable developers of any experience level to quickly build complex customised reports, such as multi-pass analytic reports or reports that access multiple data sources, that once required expensive proprietary tools and teams of highly technical developers.” "By providing a commercial version of BIRT, Actuate is providing valuable support in our mission of expanding the Eclipse ecosystem," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. "Some companies require the indemnification, services, support, and versioning provided by commercial offerings of open source projects such as Actuate BIRT 2.0." Page 1 "Reporting has been an under-filled need in PHP. As part of supporting PHP development on Eclipse, Zend will be adding the ability to execute a standard BIRT XML report design from within PHP,” said Andi Gutmans, co-founder and VP technology at Zend. “The BIRT Report Designer's graphical, web design paradigm for creating standard report designs will appeal to the Web application developers that typify the PHP community, both in the commercial and open source arenas. Bringing reporting capabilities to the PHP community will be a win-win situation for all.” Actuate BIRT Showcased at EclipseCon 2006 Actuate BIRT 2.0 and Eclipse BIRT 2.0 will be showcased at EclipseCon 2006, March 20th - 23rd at the Santa Clara Convention Center, at booth 505. BIRT will also be discussed during two sessions at the show, “BIRT In Depth: Extending and Using the BIRT Framework” on March 20th , 2006 at 1:30pm and “Leveraging BIRT Reporting in your Applications” on March 22nd , 2006 at 9:45am. The BIRT Report Design Contest will be premiered during EclipseCon with the entries due by April 28th , 2006, more information can be found by visiting http://www.eclipse.org/birt/contest or emailing [email protected]. EclipseCon attendees will also have the opportunity to pre-order two new books from The Eclipse Series from Addison-Wesley: BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting and Integrating and Extending BIRT. Attendees who pre-order these books at the DigitalGuru conference bookstore at EclipseCon will receive exclusive advance copies of the books to bring home. Features of Actuate BIRT 2.0 Actuate BIRT 2.0 delivers out-of-the-box integration for several commercial data sources as well as new functionality identical to the Eclipse BIRT project, its open source Eclipse Public License (EPL) equivalent. Similar to Actuate BIRT 1.0, Actuate BIRT 2.0 includes Actuate-backed licensing, maintenance, professional services and support. Key features of Actuate BIRT 2.0 include: One Button Download – With the click of a button report developers can quickly install and integrate BIRT with a variety of data sources. Re-Use Library – A report component environment allows developers with a range of expertise to share their work within the organisation and the open source community. Libraries contain report components or functions for reuse in multiple report designs. Page-on-Demand HTML- A page-on-demand navigation mechanism enables the efficient viewing of large report documents over the internet. Response time for end-users is optimised, ensuring that web applications are built with acceptable performance. CSS Style Sheets – External style sheets can be used across multiple report designs, making it easy to establish a common look across all reports in one application. Users can quickly change the design of many reports by editing a single style sheet. Scripting Editor – In addition to scripting in JavaScript, Actuate BIRT supports the ability to code or script the behaviour of reports using Java in a Java Code Editing perspective for BIRT reports. Large, Persistent Reports – Report developers can generate a report and then distribute a URL to end-users who, with one click, can navigate through the pages in any order. All this is done without return trips to the database. Page 2 Pricing and Availability Actuate BIRT 2.0 is available immediately as a subscription deployment license at various levels of product deployment and support. Annual subscription-based pricing begins at $95 per developer. Actuate BIRT can be downloaded at www.actuate.com/birt, for more information call (800) 884 8665 or email [email protected]. About Actuate Corporation Actuate Corporation is the world leader in Enterprise Reporting and Performance Management Applications that empower 100% of users to achieve breakthrough corporate performance. Actuate provides the most scalable, reliable, flexible and high-performing reporting capabilities for every application in the enterprise. Customers use Actuate to deliver information in context to users inside and outside the firewall as Performance Management and Customer Self-Service applications, managed spreadsheet applications and Java reporting applications. Actuate has over 3,500 customers globally in a range of industries including banking, insurance, manufacturing, communications, and government. Founded in 1993, Actuate has headquarters in South San Francisco, Calif., with offices worldwide. Actuate is listed on the NASDAQ exchange under the symbol ACTU. For more information on Actuate, visit the company's Web site at www.actuate.com. Copyright© 2006 Actuate Corporation. All rights reserved. Actuate and the Actuate logo are registered trademarks of Actuate Corporation and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and certain other countries. 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