Actuate Announces Partner Support for Information Delivery Solutions

Business Wire, Oct 16, 2000

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 16, 2000

Acta, Allaire, Plumtree Software and SilverStream Point to Information

Delivery Solutions as Critical to e-Business Platforms

Actuate(R) Corporation (Nasdaq:ACTU), the Information Delivery market leader, today unveiled its new Information Delivery solution, Actuate e.Reporting Suite 5. The announcement of Actuate 5 prompted several leading e-Business software companies to extend their support for Information Delivery, tabbing it a critical component of an e-Business platform.

High praise for Information Delivery comes from e-Business leaders including Acta, Allaire, Plumtree Software and SilverStream Software. Actuate's Information Delivery solution enables companies to streamline supply chains and deepen customer relationships by delivering information in more timely and useful manner. Actuate, with its current product, has gained a leadership position in this space by developing the industry's most powerful and functional Information Delivery solution available.

"Information Delivery solutions unleash valuable business information contained within back-office systems and are a perfect complement to the Acta eCommerce Data Platform," said Acta CEO Carol Mills Baldwin. "As more and more data is captured in back-office systems, the close integration of Acta and Actuate products enables both companies to better address the needs of customers requiring a comprehensive Information Delivery solution."

"Information Delivery is particularly significant to managers in the Internet economy, due to the large amount of mission-critical data contained in Internet business systems," said Adam Berrey, director of product management for Allaire. "Actuate 5's new capabilities will give ColdFusion users more options and greater capabilities for creating Web business reports to better understand Internet and corporate business data."

"Actuate is a comprehensive Information Delivery solution that, when combined with the Plumtree Corporate Portal 4.0, will allow a company to leverage Actuate's powerful capabilities for sharing and delivering operational information in a single, scalable, and secure Web platform," said Steve Pattison, vice president of business development at Plumtree Software. "The forthcoming Plumtree e.Reporting gadgets will allow internal employees, suppliers, and partners to access a range of content from sales forecasts, 401K statements, performance reports and other corporate information across the enterprise."

"At SilverStream, we have created a comprehensive platform for enabling corporations to conduct personalized eBusiness with customers, employees and trading partners," said Bill Critch, Director of Alliances, SilverStream Software. "A critical element of our strategy for providing a total solution to our customers is partnering with leading vendors in key technology areas. Actuate's strength in the area of information delivery reinforces our `best-of-breed' partnering philosophy. We believe that Information Delivery is one of the cornerstones of e-Business, and we will continue to work with industry leaders like Actuate to provide seamless, comprehensive solutions to our customers."

Information Delivery for e-Business Platforms

In the last year, the e-Business world woke up to the idea of e-Business platforms -- a software infrastructure for running applications critical to doing business over the Internet. The typical e-Business platform would include Content Management systems (for publishing documents and images such as online brochures and one-to-one marketing), Application Servers (for processing transactions), and Information Delivery solutions (for delivering information such as sales forecasts, key performance indicators, client statements and electronic invoices to customers, partners and employees).

While Content Management systems and Application Servers have established their presence over the last few years, Information Delivery solutions have gained recognition in the last year. Information Delivery systems create, manage and deliver relevant business information to customers, partners and employees. More than simply formatting data, an effective Information Delivery system must:

-- Use operational data from multiple sources (e.g. RDBMS, data warehouse,
C++/Java application objects, legacy systems, flat files, EAI, etc.)

-- Merge and transform data from any source so that the combined information
can be manipulated in many ways including performing any calculations

-- Format and personalize the information in any conceivable way

-- Make information available on-demand, triggered by an event or scheduled and
cached for later viewing

-- Protect valuable information by providing access based on a user's profile
without replicating profiles stored and administered in centralized directory
servers (e.g., LDAP, Microsoft Active Directory)

-- Deliver perfectly formatted and stunningly clear content to people via
browser without a download (via DHTML), to a printer (via PDF), or to another
application (via XML) from a single content specification

-- Produce interactive and actionable content that takes full advantage of the
immediacy and interactivity of the Web to deliver information that is simple to
understand and navigate and can be acted upon (e.g., approve invoices that can
then be automatically routed to accounts payable for processing)

-- Scale to support hundreds of thousands (100,000s) of users and integrate
seamlessly with the look and feel as well as other components (e.g. content
management system, application server) and services (e.g. security,
personalization, business logic layer) of the e-Business platform