[January 24, 2013]

Actuate Launches BIRT Analytics Offering Fast, Free-form Visual Data Mining and Predictive Analytics for Business Users

Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ: BIRT), The BIRT Company™ - delivering more insights to more people than all BI companies combined, today announced BIRT Analytics™, a visual data mining and predictive analytics product that dramatically streamlines sophisticated data analysis and puts it in the hands of business users.

Francisco J. Margarite, Director General at Inversis Bank says: "Before Quiterian, extracting and analyzing information used to take a considerable amount of our technical experts' time - and as a consequence we were not providing the appropriate service. Now with BIRT Analytics, we have provided more user autonomy and thus reduced the work overload of IT."

BIRT Analytics provides analysts and business users with agility and advanced functionality to make better, more timely decisions in an age of Big Data by providing them with an intuitive, managed self-service environment for getting their answers. It delivers the ease of use and flexibility of visual data discovery tools with the sophisticated statistics and complex algorithmic power of advanced analytics tools that typically are reserved for data scientists. BIRT Analytics is the latest addition to ActuateOne^®, Actuate's (News - Alert) BIRT-based suite of commercial products, enabling users across the organization to participate in improving vital business processes.

"BIRT Analytics is intuitive and fun to work with, so analytics will no longer be seen as a chore. It is also powerful enough to find value in the vast data volumes that users are confronted with today," said Shaku Atre, Founder and Managing Partner, Atre Group. "The business user being in charge of their own data-driven inquiry finds that this is the only way to speed the time to meaningful insight and pair it with effective actions to separate market leaders from market laggards."

Establishing a Culture of Analytics for Faster Answers

Analytics is ultimately about solving business problems. With BIRT Analytics, the business person with the questions is empowered to come up with their own answers - and formulate new questions to explore. By putting the business user in charge, without having to depend on a data scientist or an IT department, analytics becomes more appealing, timely and valuable.

"BIRT Analytics is a true business-user-driven tool," says Daniel Fedak, Managing Director at VPT, a UK-based provider of analytics and business intelligence solutions for business. "Ad-hoc queries can be made through an intuitive and highly visual interface without the need to go through IT or analytics specialists. Users 'discover' ever-deepening insights through an exploratory process that is very natural."

BIRT Analytics is ideally suited to organizations with an innate analytic attitude or inquiring culture and in dynamic sectors where rapid action on insights is a competitive requirement. Without having to adhere to prescriptve data schemas or being hindered by linear querying pathways, business users can explore free-form. They can see and experience all their data in a single location, and even integrate third-party data sources without the need to program, model or otherwise pre-process data. In very little time, end users can take personal pride in their own findings-their own information independence-and be wowed by insights they derive from their data.

"Our recent Business Technology Innovation benchmark research shows that currently a little more than half of organizations are satisfied with their analytic processes, and 44 percent of organizations indicate the most time-consuming part of the analytics process is data-related tasks," said Tony Cosentino, Vice President and Research Director at Ventana Research. "BIRT Analytics allows end users to continue to extract value out of and combine their data silos, while the organization is devising their Big Data analytics strategy. Developing a culture of analytics enables analysts to shape the discussion with IT; so that once the strategy is defined it is meaningful from a business and operational point of view."

"In business software, it is rare to see the sort of emotional response we've noted when business users get started with BIRT Analytics," said Pete Cittadini, CEO and President, Actuate Corporation. "Analytics is as valuable as the problems it solves. We truly believe that by putting analytics in the hands of business users, they feel more empowered because of the answers they identify. These insights have profound organizational impact, dramatically reducing the business latency typically associated with data mining."

Notable Features

BIRT Analytics is the right choice for business-driven visual data mining and predictive analytics because it:

• Ensures speed and agility in every aspect of analytics from data connectivity and loading to processing the results of sophisticated analytic queries, thereby helping to keep organizations ahead of the competition;
• Empowers the business user with predictive analytics and visual data discovery, while most products support one or the other;
• Creates Pareto distributions, Venn diagrams, predictions, trend lines and forecasts in moments, without requiring mastery of a special analytic language such as R or SAS (News - Alert);
• Works with all types of data, without pre-modeling or sampling and scales to support billions of data records making it ideal for Big Data Business Analytics;
• Assumes no specific data structure, schema, or architecture, instead offering a flexible, non-imposing data architecture;
• Shares its data and insights with ActuateOne's published dashboards, scorecards, interactive reporting and mobile presentation to circulate key insights for collaboration and action; and
• Connects to social and Internet data sources including Facebook, Twitter (News - Alert), Salesforce, Google Analytics and CheetahMail.

Pricing and Availability

BIRT Analytics is available immediately. It is licensed using a combination of a base license, the number of data rows being analyzed and the number of end users. More resources, including a product demonstration are available at www.actuate.com/BIRTAnalytics.

Actuate - The BIRT Company^™

Actuate founded and co-leads the BIRT open source project, which is used by 2 million developers around the globe and serves as the foundation of the ActuateOne^® platform. Applications built on ActuateOne deliver more business and consumer insights to more people than all BI companies combined - ensuring organizations are ready for the exponential growth of Big Data and the proliferation of touch devices.

The ActuateOne platform empowers developers to rapidly develop custom, BIRT-based business analytics and customer communications applications. ActuateOne applications built with one BIRT design can access and integrate any data, including unstructured sources. They provide one user experience regardless of skill level and are supported by one platform for any cloud, hybrid, on-premise, web or touch device deployment.

Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Actuate has over 5,000 customers globally in a diverse range of business areas including financial services, technology and the public sector. Actuate is listed on NASDAQ under the symbol BIRT. For more information, visit www.actuate.com or engage with the BIRT community at www.birt-exchange.com.

Copyright © 2013 Actuate Corporation. All rights reserved. Actuate, ActuateOne, and the Actuate logo are registered trademarks of Actuate Corporation and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and certain other countries. All other brands, names or trademarks mentioned may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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