Actuate delivers information to the masses
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Actuate enables organisations to deliver customised reports to large numbers of internal and external "information consumers" on a scale that mainstream business intelligence vendors are only starting to address.
Traditional business intelligence (BI) tools have a scaling problem when it comes to reports. They handle querying and analysis well, but when it comes to delivering customised browser-based reports to thousands - maybe even hundreds of thousands - of employees, customers or partners they fall well short, argues Mike Thoma, vice president of strategy at Actuate.
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This is the gap that Actuate has jumped into, whether the requirement is for internal sales reports for each regional manager at a multinational or to provide online statement look-up for customers of a major bank. "Actuate Server allows companies to create, manage and deliver secure formatted content, using business information from multiple data sources, in the form of web reports, email alerts, printed documents, or spreadsheets," says Thoma.
A rapid take-up of Actuate sales to leading organisations such as DHL, American Express and Prudential support Thoma's claim that while less than 5% of employees in Global 2,500 require query and analysis tools in order to do their jobs effectively, there is a vast - and still largely untapped - market for tools that enable information delivery to much larger groups of 'information consumers'.
In addition to its direct sales, Actuate derives around a third of its annual software sales through reseller deals with other software companies. For example, Siebel System embeds Actuate's reporting capabilities into its customer relationship management suite (without the user ever knowing Actuate is driving their reports). Others integrating its software include PeopleSoft, i2 Technologies, and Niku.
With the May 2002 release of version 6, Actuate has incorporated a number of new features to its product set, including clustering, load balancing and automatic failover that company executives claim will enable customers to scale information delivery to up to a million users.
Such advances have given Actuate a considerable lead in its niche segment of BI - but one that the traditional BI tools vendors will inevitably try to attack.
