Actuate is a public company that ranked number 245 on Software Magazine’s 2013 Software 500, reporting software and services revenues of $138.8M for the ranking year.
The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with more than 5,000 enterprise customers in financial services, technology, government, and healthcare. It has 22 locations worldwide and more than 500 employees. It was founded in 1993.
Based on BIRT
Actuate’s flagship product line, based on BIRT, was introduced in 2005. The company founded and supports BIRT—the open source IDE, and develops BIRT iHub—a deployment platform, to improve the productivity of developers working on customer-facing applications. BIRT iHub is designed to transform complex data seamlessly and effectively into compelling visualizations including graphs, charts, tables, and diagrams. “With customizable features, like dashboards, statements, applications, and interactive reports, the BIRT iHub Visualization Platform is accessible through any Internet browser or smart mobile devices,” explains Nobby Akiha, SVP, marketing, Actuate.
BIRT iHub also powers Actuate’s BIRT Analytics, which delivers self-service predictive analytics to enhance customer engagements using big data, and the Actuate Customer Communications Suite including BIRT PowerDocs, the salesforce.com and Oracle application (app) for the creation of complex customer documents in the cloud.
F-Type
This Summer, Actuate announced the launch of BIRT iHub F-Type. The new software touts open source BIRT developers’ productivity through free access to features and power for the commercial BIRT iHub enterprise-grade development platform, with metered output capacity.
Previously, developers using open source BIRT had to build a deployment infrastructure in the form of a custom report server in order to share content with individual end users across multiple devices. In contrast, the company claims that within the first 15 minutes of downloading BIRT iHub F-Type, a developer can import a BIRT report, schedule, secure distribution, or export their report as a full-function Excel spreadsheet.
Development of F-Type has been in development since December of 2013. Akiha notes that the introduction of the freemium server—for the more than 3.5 million open source developers of BIRT reports, dashboards, and visualizations—represents a shift that aligns with the influence consumer apps have on business app development. “BIRT iHub F-Type allows us to meet the demands for content management and deployment functionality. Key features include automatic end-user interactivity, export to native Excel format, secure deployment to multiple end users on multiple devices, and enrichment of compelling visualizations for a much larger audience of open source developers, beyond our traditional enterprise customers.”
With this product, Actuate delivers a free report deployment platform for open source developers based on an enterprise platform. F-Type solves a common problem for open source developers who otherwise have to code their own infrastructure to deploy reports and visualizations they’ve built using the BIRT open source IDE.
“The solution is freemium, like Dropbox or Skype, where users are able to use the free features of a premium product that—in this case, is limited only by output capacity,” says Akiha. When developers need more output capacity, they can instantly subscribe to it right from within the app, with a credit card.
Freemium Flexibility
BIRT iHub F-Type server targets open source Eclipse BIRT developers and other Java developers interested in deploying open source BIRT data reports and visualizations without having to build a custom report server. The secondary target is Java developers doing reporting and visualization delivery using other tools.
There are currently more than 3.5 million BIRT developers; and BIRT iHub has over 5,000 enterprise customers with more than 200 million end user recipients of the reports and visualizations.
At press time, BIRT iHub F-Type was released for two weeks, and estimated current downloads was over 1,000. SW
Aug2014, Software Magazine
