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Jeff
Morris
Director
of Product Marketing
Actuate
Corporation
"Actuate continues to demonstrate our ability to
deliver this
high-value information to 100% of the enterprise at
fractions
of the cost of our competitors." |
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Jeff Morris
responds to Techieindex about Actuate the company, its
solutions and Actuate's focus towards retaining its market
leading position in the information delivery space.
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Techieindex:
It is suggested that end users continue to look to
spreadsheets as the a key analysis tool to supplement other BI
tools. The ease of use and the flexibility spreadsheets offer
continue to make tools such as Microsoft Excel an integral
part of most Business Analytics implementations. What are the
different Actuate solutions that complement or supplement
existing spreadsheet functionality in enterprise
organizations?
Jeff Morris: Microsoft Excel is the primary interactive
reporting interface for the business user, and there are 120
Million Excel users. GIGA estimates that business users make
up 25% of the enterprise population. These users are
comfortable and highly productive with the Microsoft Office
Suite of applications. They are not likely to change their
work habits, so Actuate has chosen to embrace them and provide
them a reporting platform that leverages their current
experience.
Actuate's e.Spreadsheet product gives these business users
access to the corporate information they need, while it
eliminates the most common spreadsheet reporting problems: |
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e.Spreadsheet
delivers business users fully functioning Excel
spreadsheets, either on schedule or on demand from the
Actuate Information Server. The server ensures that each
user has a consistent and up to date view of the corporate
information. e.Spreadsheet lets IT maintain one version of
the truth, delivered through each version of the report.
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An
Excel spreadsheet generated by e.Spreadsheet comes
complete with cell formats, Excel calculations, live
charts, outlining for drill-downs, even conditional
formatting and query values, eliminating the formatting,
figuring, and summarization steps required when common
query builders dump results to Excel without preserving
formats or calculations. We estimate that fully
functioning spreadsheets save spreadsheet consumer an
average of 15 minutes per report in reformatting time. If
that individual receives four reports per week, they waste
an hour a week. If that user's fully loaded cost is $150K,
then we save the company $3,000 per report consumer,
annually. In a two hundred-user environment that's
$600,000 in savings.
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The
e.Spreadsheet Designer is an easy to use spreadsheet
report definition tool that leverages the business user's
Excel experience. It contains familiar menus, wizards,
formats and formulas that define the spreadsheet's
database query, including the option for user-input
parameters at runtime, visual layout, charts and formulas.
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No
training is required in order to use the e.Spreadsheet
designer to create spreadsheet reports because Actuate
draws upon the report creator's Excel expertise, not their
experience using BI tools.
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e.Spreadsheet
reports can be widely distributed as the Actuate
Information Server controls permissions, security, timing
and distribution of the Excel spreadsheets to thousands of
users. Business improvements result from high information
flow and low TCO.
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2.
How does Actuate solutions support core legacy and package
applications in enterprise IS organizations thereby enhancing
business opportunities in a time when organizations are moving
onto the web services architecture?
Actuate's information delivery platform lets companies drive
more information to more users. This is accomplished by
leveraging Actuate's core architectural strengths, an
Object-Oriented report development environment coupled to a
massively scaleable information delivery platform. Both of
these integrate directly into both a .NET and J2EE
environment. The combination of Actuate's e.Report Designer
Professional and the Actuate Information Server let
organizations transform the information resident in legacy
systems and present it in modern web-friendly forms such as,
DHTML, Java, PDF, XML and Excel. Enterprises use Actuate to
create Information Applications that reside in intranets,
customer portals, and public web sites. These applications are
then managed using the same web services, through
browser-based access to Actuate's scaleable, reliable and
secure server that oversees user access, report scheduling,
creation, publishing and delivery.
3. What is the Formula One e.Spreadsheet
Engine? How is Actuate aiming in implementing it at IS
organization and how will the e.Reporting Engine Java Edition
complement Formula One e.Spreadsheet Engine in bringing
business benefits to organizations?
The e.Spreadsheet Engine is portable technology that allows
Actuate OEMs to build spreadsheet reports into their own
applications. Reporting is often one of the most neglected
features of software applications. The e.Spreadsheet Engine
lets our business partners add robust reporting capabilities
easily, without excessive overhead in integration resources or
documentation. The e.Reporting Engine Java Edition lets OEMs
deliver reporting functions in their web applications, further
enhancing its content and utility.
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4.
How is Actuate planning to focus on the Global 2000 companies
and other packaged application software vendors who have a
proactive strategy to reach customers, prospects, partners,
and employees using the Internet especially in a global
economy that has not yet shown signs of picking up from the
slump it has been in for the past two years?
The BI marketplace is showing modest steady growth given the
current economic conditions. Information Applications continue
to demonstrate their value to the Global 2000 as they strive
to improve business efficiency and reduce costs. The new
concept of Business Process Management (BPM) requires that the
right information, in the right format, at the right time gets
delivered to the right people in order to facilitate action.
Actuate continues to demonstrate our ability to deliver this
high-value information to 100% of the enterprise at fractions
of the cost of our competitors.
5. How can organizations leverage
investment in Excel to distribute report creation throughout
the Enterprise using Actuate solutions? What are the business
benefits gained using the Actuate e.Spreadsheet products?
Actuate recently announced that any spreadsheet savvy user
could learn to use the e.Spreadsheet designer in fifteen
minutes. The designer behaves like Excel so effectively, that
users forget that they are working in the report development
tool. e.Spreadsheet designer includes a query wizard, a range
definition wizard and a toggle button to switch between the
report design and the spreadsheet preview. The resulting
spreadsheets are server-driven, versioned and personalized to
each recipient. Being so, an enterprise can cast these
spreadsheets to a wider audience, while preserving a
consistent view of the "truth" and eliminating one
of IT's biggest nightmares-reconciling the duel between
homegrown reports of the same data between different
departments.
6. How does Actuate maintain its
position as a market leading provider of information delivery
solutions? How does it leverage the interaction that Actuate
maintains with industry research organizations and analysts?
We set the standard for Information Delivery within and beyond
the enterprise. Now web services integration and the need to
server 100% of the enterprise has created the demand for
Information Applications, applications that present high
quality, personalized information derived by the
transformation of transactional data found in traditional
applications. Examples of these include online bank
statements, boarding pass generation, dashboards that track
key performance indicators and spreadsheets that contain
today's sales forecast. We maintain regular relationships with
analysts that identify and validate these trends, such as the
hunger for users to consume more information in useful
formats. Right now, we see a unique opportunity to slake the
Excel savvy business users' hunger.
7. Global 2000 companies are
increasingly trying to connect with their customers,
prospects, partners and employees over the Internet. The
adoption of the Internet and web technologies have created new
opportunities for organizations to add value to their existing
enterprise applications. How will Actuate solutions manage in
delivering their information delivery needs?
Our customers have been building web-based information
applications for years. We are pioneers in getting information
to users via web services. The Actuate Information Application
Platform is the unusual in its ability to A) integrate and
transform legacy data using .NET or J2EE into presentation
quality forms that the extended enterprise can consume through
a browser; and then B) deliver it reliably, to these vast
consumer communities without breaking the bank. Performance,
scalability, and reliability are key to our customers' success
as they strive to deliver more information to their web
applications without over investing in backend infrastructure
to enable it.
8. "Reporting solutions that
combine end-user spreadsheet creation with IT management
controls is going to determine the speeding up of data
warehouse adoption". How does Actuate plan to realize
this and enable in reducing the duplication of efforts and
data and thereby enhance productivity?
Like our traditional products, e.Spreadsheet maintains IT's
control over access rights to information. e.Spreadsheet is
remarkable in that it opens the report creation door to the
business user, who was traditionally resigned to requesting
reports from IT, or to accepting those that IT already had
written. With e.Spreadsheet, IT sets permissions on data
access, while giving the business user the ability to create,
publish and deliver spreadsheets to each other. This may
accelerate the acceptance and utility of the data warehouse,
but it doesn't require it either.
9. In a scenario when companies are
looking at partnerships and mergers to widen their core area
of application, hence enhancing market penetration, how does
Actuate look at partnerships and strategic allainces to
leverage business benefits to clients as well as reach out to
vrgin areas? Which are the target areas that Actuate is
looking to target in the coming few years?
We are looking to add value to our Global 9000 customers.
These organizations have already invested in ERP and CRM
systems such as SAP and PeopleSoft and they are tightly
aligned with IBM and Microsoft. They are looking to take
information found in those systems and deliver them through
our information application platform. It is a natural fit, so
these are the Business partners with whom we are investing our
time.
10. Actuate has established itself as an
Information Delivery market leader. How long has the journey
been and how did the economic boom in the mid 90's help it
grow and how much did the slump that followed affect it? How
did it leverage its products and solutions to stay on top of a
floundering economy?
We're ten years old, practically grandparents to the Internet
Age. We created a healthy business for ourselves as the
Internet matured. Actuate is successful because our products
give our customers information in ways that all their users
can digest. The Internet, and web-based information
applications dramatically increased the number of information
consumers. We became the Information Delivery leader because
we could keep pace with the demand for both reports and
information they contain. It is interesting to note that
during both good times and bad, the need for organizations to
know 'why?' always remains. This lets more users participate
in finding the answers, and therefore makes healthier
businesses. Healthy businesses are happy customers |
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Jeff Morris brings 14 years of application platform marketing experience to Actuate. Most recently, Jeff spent five years at Sendmail, Inc. as the Director of Mailcenter Marketing, building scaleable email servers that grew the company from zero revenue to positive cash flow. Prior to Sendmail, Jeff was the senior product manager at Borealis Technology Corp, a mobile CRM vendor who's specialty was synchronization of data, schema and application logic to thousands of clients. Jeff was Manager of Marketing Communications for nearly three years at Forte Software, the champion of application partitioning, helping grow Forte into and past it's initial public offering. Jeff joined Forte after spending five years at Interactive Development Environments, a CASE vendor, where he held numerous marketing positions, built information applications, and used Business Intelligence tools popular at the time. Jeff studied electrical engineering and history at Syracuse University.
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