Eclipse Foundation and Actuate Announce Approval of
Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools Project
- Industry Analysts Applaud Actuate's Bold Move in Open Source
South San Francisco, Calif. - October 6, 2004 - Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ:
ACTU), the world leader in Enterprise Reporting Applications, and the
Eclipse Foundation, a community committed to the implementation of a universal
platform for tools integration, today announced that the Eclipse Foundation
has officially approved the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools
(BIRT) Project. Thirty days after posting the BIRT proposal on the Eclipse
website, there has been a positive response from Open Source developers
who have given feedback to the first Eclipse-backed BI project.
"The Eclipse community and our board members are pleased to accept
BIRT as a top level project," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director
of the Eclipse Foundation, Inc. "The volume of positive feedback
received in response to the BIRT proposal clearly demonstrates the need
for a Business Intelligence and reporting tool as part of the Eclipse
technology portfolio."
Now that the BIRT project has been officially approved by Eclipse, Actuate
will begin the task of stewarding development of BIRT, which is expected
to culminate in the industry's first open Business Intelligence and Reporting
platform by early 2005. Industry analysts agree that BIRT will benefit
developers and Actuate by expanding the visibility of business intelligence
and reporting to a wide audience of developers. These developers require
easy to use tools, such as BIRT, to decrease development costs associated
with the core application functions of reporting and analysis.
Industry Analysts Embrace Actuate's Decision to Support BI Open Source
Development
Forrester Research
"Actuate is being aggressive in an area where most of its competitors
choose not to be: open-source," noted Keith Gile, senior analyst,
Forrester Research. In his September 2004 report, Actuate Pioneers Open
Source Business Intelligence And Reporting, he adds that "BI vendors
that have avoided participation in an open-source initiative need to rethink
this approach, and ideally get involved, as open-source will be an issue
that must be addressed sooner than later."
Gartner
On 26 August 2004 Bill Hostmann, research director, Gartner Research and
Mark Driver, vice president and research director, Gartner Research co-authored
an article entitled "Actuate Brings BI Technology to Open Source
Group." The full text of their analysis is available at: http://www.actuate.com/download/actuate_brings_.pdf
IDC
"Actuate could realize strong pull-through revenue from its involvement
in the Eclipse community," said Dan Vesset, research director, IDC.
"Should demand for an open source reporting standard exist, Actuate's
active participation in Eclipse is a positive strategic move that could
give it first-mover advantage in this open source community."
META Group
"Actuate will be building BIRT from the ground up (i.e. no Actuate
iServer code will be used). However, application developers without a
core BI and reporting standard will be able to use a free open source
tool to embed with the applications they develop," said Kurt Schlegel,
senior program director, META Group.
Ventana Research
"The Eclipse Foundation's Java IDE technology reaches thousands if
not millions of Java developers. Adding BIRT to the Eclipse project portfolio
means these developers now gain similar access to business intelligence
technology," said Eric Rogge, vice president and research director,
Ventana Research. "BIRT will benefit from Actuate's experience and
competence in enterprise reporting. Actuate will benefit by expanding
their visibility in a community where the need for reporting technology
is growing."
Actuate to Steward BIRT Development Roadmap
"Actuate is honored to have the opportunity to collaborate with the
Eclipse community to build a strong Open Source foundation for Business
Intelligence and reporting," said Mark Coggins, senior vice president
of engineering at Actuate Corporation. "Our goal is to provide cooperative
leadership in the quest to bring developers an easy-to-use tool that will
help decrease Business Intelligence and reporting development costs and
increase innovation in this area. Now that BIRT is approved, the next
order of business is to post a set of project milestones for the technology."
The BIRT Project will leverage the Eclipse platform to provide infrastructure
and tools for designing, deploying, generating and viewing reports. BIRT
will be an easy-to-use platform to quickly and effectively create and
deploy reports without the high development cost associated with having
the developer hand-code the reports components.
To Find Out More
To become involved in the development of BIRT please visit www.eclipse.org/proposals/eclipse-birt/index.html.
More information is available at: www.actuate.com/corporate/corporateresources.asp?ArticleId=7256.
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