US reporting company seeks deals with NZ developers

Enterprise reporting software company Actuate is discussing with New Zealand applications vendors the possibility of embedding the Actuate product into their software.

Actuate derives a large slice of its market from such OEM deals, says Grant Christian, director of Australia and New Zealand channels. Actuate is based in San Francisco.

Siebel, Calidus, MRO asset management and some major insurance products already use Actuate — the company’s product of the same name — to provide their reporting capability. Christian declines to name any of the local companies considering a similar route.

The company promotes Actuate as the true enterprise reporting system, directed at 100% of a user company’s staff and giving them a web-based way to view and manipulate vital figures. This distinguishes it from the typical business intelligence system, which is usually in the service of a limited number of analysts of management personnel, who feed inflexible “results” down to the rank-and-file staff.

Actuate last week released version 8 of its software, which for the first time uses Enterprise Information Integration (EII). Originally a university research product, this has been adopted by IBM as the basis for its DB2 Information Integration, and by a number of business intelligence companies. It provides an emerging standard for gathering disparate information sources into a common view.

Making this view available to all staff means everyone is “on the same page” and lessens conflict in interpretation of an organisation’s performance, he says.

While the information is centrally controlled, each staffer can display it in a format of choice, whether a spreadsheet, a “dashboard” or a set of graphs.

Previous versions of the software had proprietary routines and specific interfaces to particular applications such as SAP and Oracle Finanacials.