Actuate Joins BEA Star Program to Provide Tighter Integration of E-Business Platform Solutions

Business Wire, April 17, 2001

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 17, 2001

Actuate(R) Corporation (Nasdaq:ACTU), the Information Delivery market leader, today announced it has joined the growing list of companies in the Star Partner Program of BEA Systems, Inc., one of the world's leading e-business infrastructure software companies.

Actuate is integrating the Actuate Information Delivery solution with BEA WebLogic(R) Server to provide customers with a more tightly integrated set of BEA-ready(TM) solutions for building their e-Business applications. As a member of the BEA Star Partner Program, the Actuate Information Delivery solution is expected to perform more effectively when used with BEA WebLogic(R) Server.

An increasing number of Global 2000 companies and packaged software application vendors are building e-Business platforms around application servers, the market for which has helped to accelerate Actuate's growth. Today, at least 80 percent of Actuate's OEM customers use its Information Delivery solution with BEA WebLogic Server(TM). By more tightly integrating the two solutions, Actuate seeks to better address an application server market forecasted to be more than $11 billion by 2004, according to research firm IDC.

"Our clients building second and third generation portals are looking for components that can be integrated, rather than having to exist as monolithic applications," explains Craig Roth, program director of Web & Collaboration Strategies at META Group. "Therefore, products that can act in the background as services will be more useful since they can be added to an organization's 'bag of tricks' and sprinkled liberally among its many systems. Vendors that deliver a solid level of integration -- supporting such standards as J2EE, EJBs and XML -- will be best positioned for success in this market."

As the leading provider of Information Delivery software, Actuate is well-positioned to leverage the burgeoning application server market. Actuate's 100 percent pure Java content creation and delivery capabilities enables the Information Delivery solution to report against EJBs and therefore scale to include a larger user community -- a key differentiator between Actuate and its competition. Also, Actuate's expanded product line strategy, which includes a more cost-efficient Java development and deployment solution, provides for the sale of its Information Delivery solution into companies whose development environment is largely Java-based.

"The most prominent businesses and technology companies, including iBuilding, are developing e-Business applications based on the J2EE standard," said Martin Milani, chief technology officer at iBuilding. "The BEA WebLogic Server and Actuate Information Delivery solution are two very important pieces of iBuilding's overall architecture. Tighter integration between these industry leaders helps ensure iBuilding can more quickly and effectively develop Java-based e-Business applications. This agreement further demonstrates Actuate's commitment to supporting Java developers, both from a product development perspective as well as in its e-Business platform partner strategy."

Actuate customers will benefit from tighter integration of the company's development and deployment products with BEA and WebGain products. Improved integration between WebGain Studio and Actuate's e.Report Designer -- Java Edition tools will allow developers to create e.Reports without having to leave the integrated development environment. On the deployment side, developers can integrate and embed e.Reports into applications built with BEA WebLogic Server, using the Actuate e.Reporting Engine -- Java Edition to execute the reports.

Tighter integration between Actuate and market-leading application server vendors is an important tenet of Actuate's e-Business platform partner strategy. The goal of this program is to secure strategic technology alliances with other e-Business platform players, while establishing Actuate as the Information Delivery provider most likely to be deployed with content management systems and application servers. The e-Business platform is commonly regarded as a combination of Content Management, Application Server and Information Delivery solution, all sitting on top of a database. In particular, Actuate seeks to align itself with those e-Business platform companies that share its commitment to Java as 'the glue' for developing customized e-Business applications.

"IDC forecasts the market for application server software platforms to grow to more than $11 billion by 2004," states Steve Garone, vice president, Enterprise Integration Software at IDC. "Information Delivery is one of the key e-Business platform technologies running on top of application server infrastructures and emerging enterprise portal frameworks. Having been largely overlooked in the rush to implement content management and transaction-based systems, Information Delivery solutions are now expected to experience rapid and sustained growth over the next few years as more companies deploy these solutions as part of their e-Business Platform."