Actuate Corporation give us an update on their products and future trends, along with their new initiative into sustainability analytics. Presenting
Nobby Akiha, Senior Vice President of Marketing,
Kapil Kedar, Product Marketing Manager,
Jeff Morris, Director, Product Marketing, and
Mark Gamble, Senior Technical Marketing Manager.
The company is headquartered in San Mateo and has 4,400 customers across finance services (ouch!), government, health care, education and utilities. They generated $131M during FY08, of which $40M in licenses and $70M in maintenance. This is down from $141M the prior year.
Akiha gave an overview of the company, using this key slide showed the spectrum of products and services from Actuate. The lower left is
BIRT (the plain free open-source version) that can be used by corporations or by software developers to offer commercial products. Next to the right, BIRT can be enhanced with Flash widgets, a for-fee product. Then to the right, Actuate offers the usual departmental and enterprise software.
We got into an interesting discussion revolving around their strategy/partnership with their BIRT open source community. What is the balance between Actuate revenue potential versus BIRT community health? It is a dicey strategy for a software vendor, since community could be competing with Actuate.
Kedar gave a demo, remarking, "Actuate reports go out to many, many users. It is very scalable and web-centric." Cool demo! Lots of charts, widget, animations... Evolved into interactive reporting where we do not know the question to ask. Saw a javascript code to bring in widget into any web page, such as this blog. They promised a sample widget for me to insert HERE...
Morris explain Actuate's approach to Sustainability Management as being able to 'maintain' your sustainable business in three areas: environmental responsibility, economic prosperity, social equity. The product suite consists of over 100 metrics in carbon footprint, facility energy consumption, and so on. Impressive! Lots of thought about how to capture a broad spectrum of sustainabiltiy factors.
