Actuate Announces General Availability of BIRT onDemand

Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ: ACTU), The people behind BIRT® and the leader in open source Business Intelligence (BI), today announced the general availability of BIRT onDemand, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering based upon Actuate’s industry standard, massively scalable BIRT iServer. Leveraging the power of Actuate BIRT’s flexibility and extensibility within a cloud infrastructure, BIRT onDemand provides a unique, plug-and-play platform for BIRT-based BI applications. Capabilities such as interactivity, mobility, analytics and user configurable dashboards, combined with a host of apps from the BIRT-Exchange Marketplace, make BIRT onDemand the most complete SaaS/PaaS BI solution available.

BIRT onDemand, which has generated over 1750 accounts to date during its short beta phase, serves subscribers from leading financial institutions, airlines, manufacturers, telecommunications companies and government agencies. Subscribers have been quick to try BIRT onDemand because it provides a quick and easy way to deploy existing or new BIRT content on the cloud. In addition it enables subscribers to experience the features of BIRT iServer, allowing end users accessing BIRT content to take advantage of rich, dynamic visualizations interact with and manipulate their information and perform analysis to make intelligent decisions. BIRT onDemand also offers built-in mobile access with the ability to deploy existing BIRT content to the iPhone, iPad and Blackberry. Thus, a single content design allows end users to view the same content via their desktop, mobile and tablet device, ensuring complete continuity of user experience.

“Shaspa Bridge utilizes open source BIRT for end users to review their energy utilization. For our commercial products we are planning to offer dynamic mobile reports hosted on BIRT onDemand as an option to provide real time advanced data visualizations for users to manage their energy utilization,” said Oliver Goh, CEO Shaspa Research. “BIRT onDemand allows us to differentiate our offerings, get through the proof of concept phase more quickly and give our end customers the satisfaction of knowing they are in control. As a result, Shaspa is delivering real, responsive, smart shared spaces.”

BIRT onDemand brings the power of community-contributed apps to the world of BI, while enabling organizations to slash their investment in BI software and hardware and still enjoy instantly interactive BIRT content. Since BIRT is based on an application design metaphor and is backed by a community of over 750,000 developers, it is ubiquitous in the building of business applications, many examples of which can be found on the BIRT Exchange Marketplace. BIRT onDemand reduces the time to market for deploying any BIRT-based app to a single click, so applications including those for dashboards, Google Maps and Flash Maps can be trialed and deployed with little up-front investment. In addition, app design is aided by the templates, examples and customization services provided by the BIRT community and Actuate.

The key features of BIRT onDemand include:

• A rich feature set including interactive reports, flash visualizations and reports saved as PowerPoint, Excel®, PDF and Word.
• Dashboards with BIRT Mashboard, supporting creation of information portals with BIRT and non-BIRT content. Included at no additional cost.
• Mobile-ready content delivered to iPhone, iPad and Blackberry devices for hosted BIRT apps
• Speedy development and deployment with the aid of apps, templates and examples from the BIRT Exchange Marketplace.
• Security for account and user management, folder management, report execution, scheduling, document sharing and secure data transfer and access.
• Platform-as-a-Service that enable hosted BIRT applications on a robust implementation of Actuate’s BIRT iServer in the cloud.
• Amazon RDS (Relational Data Store) for secure data storage and connectors to other traditional and cloud-based databases.
• Eclipse IDE plug-in to upload documents and designs directly from the Eclipse IDE into BIRT onDemand. Included at no additional cost.
• Power user add-on with web-based BIRT Studio that allows power users to modify and save report designs to meet their exact needs.
• Regular enhancements and updates that will provide future capabilities including support for Information Object metadata, in-memory analytics, new data connectors and enhanced Microsoft Office support.
• Actuate BIRT Designer license that allows application designers to add Flash® charts and multiple data sources to BIRT content. One license comes free with every 25 user BIRT onDemand subscription.

Pricing and Availability

BIRT onDemand is now generally available with monthly subscription rates starting at $29.99 per user. A free 45 day trial for new subscribers is being offered for a limited time. Sign up for BIRT onDemand at http://www.BIRTonDemand.com to experience the power and ease of this brand new BI platform from Actuate. Archived replays of BIRT onDemand workshops are available at: http://www.birtondemand.com/bod/events/.

Actuate – The people behind BIRT

Actuate founded and co-leads the Eclipse BIRT open source project. ActuateOne is a unified suite of products for rapidly developing and deploying BIRT-based custom Business Intelligence applications and information applications. Applications built with ActuateOne provide one user experience regardless of task or skill level; are supported by one server for any deployment including cloud and are built with one BIRT design that can access and integrate any data source - including high volume print streams. ActuateOne adds rich data visualizations, including interactivity, dashboards, analytics, and deployment options to web and mobile BIRT applications, helping organizations drive revenue through higher customer satisfaction and improved operational performance.

Actuate has over 4,600 customers globally in a diverse range of business areas including financial services and the public sector. Founded in 1993, Actuate is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with offices worldwide. Actuate is listed on NASDAQ under the symbol ACTU. For more information, visit the company’s web site at www.actuate.com or visit the BIRT community at www.birt-exchange.com.

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