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Actuate revs its business with version 10

In a week that saw open-source ERP vendor Openbravo pull in its millionth download and SugarCRM taking it to Salesforce at its DreamForce Conference, it seems that momentum is growing for open-source applications.

Highlighting this apparent trend, Actuate, an open-source Business Intelligence vendor, has announced version 10 of its product, as well as significant momentum to go with it, as the Actuate team discussed with me by phone:

Over five million downloads in the past three years; $8 million in revenue last year and $10.5 million in the first nine months of 2008. Despite the slowing economy, Actuate has … Read more

Segmenting and growing open-source communities, Actuate/BIRT-style

One of open source's Achilles' heels is its lack of true outreach to end users. I'm not a developer. As such, I have very little influence over how OpenOffice, Linux and MySQL develop. I suppose I could request features, but how? And, more to the point, how do I derive maximum business value from the open-source projects that I use?

Actuate may have an answer to this quandary. Actuate just announced the rollout of an innovative open-source community, called BIRT Exchange, focused on open-source business intelligence. I talked with the team today and was impressed by this new community model.

Released in 2004 as a project on Eclipse, BIRT has steadily grown in importance and adoption with Eclipse. Actuate hopes that the BIRT Exchange will focus this adoption even further by improving the end-user community experience:… Read more