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1. What is Lincoln Financial Distributors, the company all about? What is your core area of business?
Headquartered in Philadelphia, Lincoln Financial Distributors, Inc. is the wholesaling distribution company of Lincoln Financial Group and its affiliate companies. Lincoln Financial Group is the marketing name for Lincoln National Corporation (NYSE:LNC), a financial services holding company with consolidated assets of nearly $100 billion and had annual consolidated revenues of $4.6 billion in 2002. Through its wealth accumulation and protection businesses, the company provides annuities, life insurance, 401(k) plans, 529 college savings plans, mutual funds, managed accounts, institutional investment and financial planning and advisory services.
2. Could you share your experience at the recently concluded Actuate International User Conference? What were the highlights this time around?
Highlights - new Actuate portal skins, specifically Actuate explorer. I enjoyed the business presentations, ex. Yahoo Diego! It was great sharing ideas and implementation strategies with others.
3. Winner of Actuate's Customer Innovation Award, Lincoln Financial Distributors has implemented an innovative approach for distributing critical sales information to their management team. Could you elaborate?
Lincoln Financial Distributors has created a system to allow Blackberry users to access sales information stored in Actuate reports. This system is composed of the Blackberry handheld device, the Cingular wireless network, and a server running Astrea software and Actuate ReportCast and Actuate Report Server. All of these components have been integrated to create a secure wireless network that delivers sales information to LFD sales management.
Once the environment has been setup, creating and publishing new or existing reports is straightforward and flexible. Although, not all reports may be suitable for these modifications, some reports with complex display configurations, such as multiple columns intermixed with text or graphs do not lend themselves to be using as a wireless report.
In order to publish a report on the wireless platform, tags are added to the Actuate report to identify sections of the report such as the TOC or the data sections. These tags are read by the Java program, which is parameterized by the XLST, and fed out as XML that is eventually displayed on the Blackberry handheld device.
These reports can also be viewed on a browser or any other browser enabled PDA device.
4. What do you think about the release of Actuate 7, which has meant that Actuate has now moved from being an information delivery platform to an information application platform? What is the significance of this release for the wider global developer community?
There are many powerful features in the new Actuate 7, I think it shows that Actuate is on the right path and is listening to our business needs and the reporting needs of the developer community.
Specifically, Information Objects/Actuate Query is on the right path, I'm looking forward to future and security enhancements to this product. Some of the other features I'm looking forward to implementing in Actuate 7 are cross tab reports the parameter features for end users, and Active Portal enhancements.
5. What is the LFD Wireless Reporting Application and how does it use the Actuate Information Application Platform to provide scalable, secure and timely information delivery?
See question 3
6. There is a lot of consolidation and mergers between the BI vendors. Where do you think should BI go from here? What do you think should be the key area of focus in the coming years?
I think the recent merger of Crystal Decisions and Business Objects and Actuates release of Information Objects/Actuate Query as well as the acquisition of Nimble Technology are a good indicator that BI Vendors are listening to one of the primary needs of the business community, which is, simple, one stop shopping for reports and data. I feel confident that with the release of 7.0 and Actuates future direction our group is posed for the future of reporting.
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