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Jeff Morris , 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.

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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.

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

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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