Taking the long view

With its involvement in the Eclipse Foundation, and the evolvement of its Business Intelligence Reporting Tools (BIRT) technology, there is no question that Actuate has fully embraced Open Source. Jeff Morris, Actuate’s senior director of product marketing, describes the new world this is opening up to Actuate and its customers.

FST: Tell us a bit about you.
Jeff Morris: I’m a senior director of product marketing at Actuate, where I’ve been for six years. This is the fifth company I’ve worked for and my second Open Source company. I’ve been in product management and product marketing types of activities for almost 20 years now. My role at Actuate combines a number of the different skills in my background, including software engineering, Open Source delivery, internet technologies, and now business intelligence and reporting technologies.

FST: Tell us about the company.
JM: We’ve been around for 16 years, founded in 1993 with a core focus on delivering server-oriented reporting technologies to a wide variety of users, or to very large user audiences.
We added the e.spreadsheet technology to address similar needs with the distribution of Excel documents to large audiences. This enables the creation of Excel spreadsheets that are immediately usable by anyone, without the traditional overhead that other applications - such as those that include plug-ins - often require.

Today, we also have the performance management environment, Performancesoft Views. We added this to the family around two and a half years ago, and it’s now been fully integrated with the Actuate iServer environment, and with our most recent solution, our Open Source foundation product: Actuate BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tools)..

FST: Who are your customers?
JM: These tend to be organisations for which large volumes of information form part of the core business – perhaps companies that sell or use information, for example, in financial services, telecommunications, government or healthcare. Our solutions also appeal to organisations in highly regulated industries, which need to provide transparency, or comply with strict auditing requirements. Financial services companies will often deploy Actuate outside the firewall, too, to create customer self-service applications such as credit card account or cash management applications, which allow customers to manipulate their cash positions across a number of different investments.

FST: Tell us about your Open Source strategy and how it came about.
JM: We recognised five years ago that the market was beginning to change, in terms of the sophistication of the tools and technologies available, enabling the creation of what we call Rich Internet Applications or Rich Information Applications (RIA). With the advent of Web 2.0, Adobe Flash became more popular, and the need for web reporting really took hold. This means building report capabilities much as you would build a web page: making sure the elements within a web page are able to dynamically re-size themselves based on the browser being used.

In addressing this particular need, we decided to create an Open Source project, called BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tools), to give as many end users and developers as possible the tools to create a modern web reporting application. Since 2004, we have evolved these capabilities very effectively. This has been to the benefit of everyone - the individual user can now take that Open Source and do what they want with it, without any obligation. They can even develop their own products, if they like. It fosters a really nice balance between corporate and individual interests.

FST: Do you encounter any resistance among large commercial enterprises, to introducing Open Source?
JM: Any objections we might have seen in the past have subsided to a large extent over recent years, especially when organisations realise that most of their Internet infrastructure, and many of the most popular operating systems, like Linux and Mac OS, are Open Source. The relationship with Eclipse, coupled with BIRT and the commercial capabilities we add to this environment, really see off any lingering concerns about deploying Open Source. Customers soon realise that they can buy real products from Actuate; build real projects and buy services to help them achieve their objectives. The fact that we have an Open Source core technology is a major benefit because of how quickly it evolves – this is very appealing to most organisations.

FST: Tell us more about your pre-built enterprise applications, including your Performancesoft performance management solutions. Do they also exploit Open Source?
JM: Yes, Performancesoft uses the Open Source BIRT technology. It has full integration now with the Actuate iServer technology, as well as the BIRT technology, which means we’re able to extract information from the Performancesoft Views application directly, and then present this as web report content back to interested parties. There are some interesting deployments, including our new Sustainability Management application which allows us to endorse or embrace green initiatives very effectively. This gives organisations insight into the real financial tangible benefits, as well as information about ecological impact. This solution is unique in that it gives a 360-degree view of performance, by looking at social, economic and internal indicators. Performancesoft delivers a set of 100 pre-defined metrics – from material costs to carbon metrics – to help get them started.

FST: Why is Open Source a good solution for this?
JM: Because it’s readily accessible and available to everyone, to help with initiatives like reducing development costs. It dramatically reduces the development costs in building a reporting or in a Sustainability Management application because so many people can use the environment. Consider that, while there were maybe 10,000-15,000 skilled developers using the earliest Actuate technology, there have been some 6.5 million downloads of BIRT technology to date; even at a 1:10 or 1:20 download ratio, that’s already hundreds of thousands of users that are able to begin contributing to the process of either creating a sustainable solution, or creating rich internet applications.

FST: Who are your main competitors, and how do you compare?
JM: We have interesting competitors across the board. We often come up against the traditional ‘business intelligence’ and performance management vendors - Actuate does well here because of our focus on solving core problems, where our rivals may offer a much broader and more diluted solution. Our understanding of performance management is unmatched by our competitors, certainly, and our related intellectual capital such as our measure library of over 12,000 metrics, reflects that. Our technologies go deep into making sure you can come up with your answer, where other vendors may only do a superficial job of solving client needs, leaving clients wanting more.

FST: How important are the community and your customers to the ongoing success of your products?
JM: The community is vital to our existence - we depend on it for feedback on how to evolve our solutions and what to include next – an example being our sustainability solution, which came from requests from our customers.

FST: Where do you see Actuate in five years?
JM: We expect an explosion in the adoption of BIRT technology, which will continue to build what is already a very successful business for Actuate. The current economic situation, and the growing need for regulation, transparency and measurability, can only boost sales of our performance management capabilities and applications.

Live Web Seminar: Gartner Recommendations on Driving Customer Retention in Banks
Date: May 20th, 2009
Time: 2:00pm British Summer Time
Duration: 1 hour
Cost: Complimentary
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