Actuate 9 Service Pack 2 Delivers Enhanced Usability and Speeds Deployment

August 13, 2007; 04:16 AM
Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ:ACTU), the leader in Business Intelligence, Performance Management and Reporting Applications, today announced the general availability of Actuate 9 Service Pack 2 (SP2). Actuate 9 SP2 is the only platform that meets the entire range of reporting requirements from pixel-perfect reporting, through ad hoc query and web-based collaborative reporting, to spreadsheet and analytics reporting. Actuate 9 SP2, like other Actuate products, provides full support for the Eclipse BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) open source development framework.

“Actuate SP2 delivers outstanding scalability, seamless usability and increased developer productivity within a collaborative reporting architecture,” said Mark Coggins, senior vice president of Engineering at Actuate. “IT organizations have increased demands for enterprise reporting applications to deliver even more detailed mission-critical information to thousands of users with varied roles and responsibilities. This solution enables as much self service as each organization is comfortable with, via skill-specific report creation environments.”

Actuate 9 SP2 solidifies the Actuate 9 platform by introducing interface and performance improvements that allow reporting applications to be developed faster and deployed more economically to larger audiences. The release also supports the latest versions of popular third-party products including operating systems, application servers, databases and browsers, which, combined with the enhancements to the quality of printed output for BIRT and BusinessReports, allow a broader set of deployment and reporting requirements to be addressed.

Actuate 9 SP2 comprises several integrated products. New features by product are:

Actuate BIRT: The foundation for the products in the Collaborative Reporting Architecture, Actuate BIRT is a flexible, 100% pure Java reporting technology for building and publishing reports using a wide range of data sources.

• High performance report generation and viewing, leveraging the highly scalable iServer deployment framework
• Optimization and increased fidelity for PDF report output
• New automatic thumbnail image generation for convenient preview of user configurable BIRT templates

Actuate BusinessReports Studio: Since its launch in Actuate 9, BusinessReports has become a powerful extension of the Actuate 9 Platform, providing business users with the ability to access and format information in an ad hoc manner, in a controlled environment maintained by IT. Enhanced usability features include an auto report layout capability that uses gridlines to ensure precision, the availability of graphical ‘drag handles’ to manipulate report objects, and the ability to edit labels for calculations and aggregate values.

Actuate Interactive Viewer: Actuate Interactive Viewer offers a rich internet application (RIA) interface to allow end users to personalize report output. Interactive viewing has been improved by moving the viewing engine to the iServer, allowing the viewing engine to leverage the performance optimizations available in the iServer platform. New compound filters enable users to perform a wider range of in-report analysis. For example, a user can create a filter to list all orders in the US and Japan when the order total exceeds a certain threshold.

Information Objects: Actuate Information Objects are virtual meta data views of corporate information presented in business-friendly terms via Actuate products including e.Reports, e.Spreadsheet, BusinessReports, BIRT Reports and Actuate Query. Information Objects harness the power of Enterprise Information Integration (EII) technologies to combine disparate data sources in real time, which accelerates good decision making across the enterprise.

• Features fine-grained query performance controls, including enhanced rules- and cost-based optimization
• Supports efficient management and storage of intermediate results sets
• Incorporates explicit query trimming hints for controlling query behavior

Actuate e.Spreadsheet: This powerful spreadsheet report authoring tool automates and centralizes spreadsheet production, maintenance, archiving and security, thus eliminating version discrepancies and curbing the proliferation of multiple silos of Excel data.

• Delivers advanced performance optimizations to drive down report distribution costs to very large audiences
• Increases productivity and usability for e.Spreadsheet Designer, with new matrix script commands and improvements to cell locking

Actuate e.Reports: Actuate e.Reports enable developers to create high resolution, brochure quality reports that are distributed outside, as well as inside, the firewall. These pixel-perfect reports allow organizations to represent their brand at its best to employees, investors, customers and partners. New enhancements speed creation of high resolution reports.

Actuate 9 SP2 is certified for use with the latest releases of the market leading operating systems, application servers and databases.

Product Availability

Actuate 9 Service Pack 2 is available immediately. For more information please visit: http://www.actuate.com/info/weba9sp2newfeatures-pr.asp.

About Actuate Corporation

Actuate Corporation, the leader in Business Intelligence, Performance Management and Reporting Applications, enables organizations to develop solutions that optimize corporate performance. Applications built on Actuate’s open source-based platform provide all stakeholders inside and outside the firewall, including employees, customers, partners and citizens with information that they can easily access and understand to maximize revenue, cut costs, improve customer satisfaction, streamline operations, create competitive advantage and make better decisions.

Actuate has over 4,000 customers globally in a diverse range of business areas including financial services and the public sector. Founded in 1993, Actuate has headquarters in South San Francisco, California, with offices worldwide. Actuate is listed on NASDAQ under the symbol ACTU. For more information on Actuate, visit the company's web site at www.actuate.com.

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