Reportedly they're allies - Forte Software's alliance with Actuate Software - Company Business and Marketing - Brief Article

Software Magazine, March, 1997

Forte Software Inc., Oakland, Calif., and Actuate Software Corp., San Mateo, Calif., have formed an alliance stemming from Actuate's Enterprise Partner Program. Forte will bundle a version of Actuate's reporting software with each copy of the Forte Development Environment. Forte will also recommend Actuate as its premier reporting environment. Both the Forte and Actuate products are object-oriented and three-tiered. Because the two firms also have several customers in common, the deal makes sense for both companies, says Al Campa, Actuate's VP of marketing.

Actuate's Enterprise Partner Program was created to bring development environments, packaged applications, data ware- houses and the Internet together to form a single corporate infrastructure. According to Campa, a link from each of those products or technologies into the reporting system gives everyone who can access Actuate access to all the other data, depending on user privileges. "Think of it as an integration technology without a lot of the pain of trying to integrate these applications," he says.

Other tools vendors who have joined the Enterprise Partner Program include Unify Corp., San Jose, Calif., and Progress Software Corp., Bedford, Mass.Client, What Client?

Internet upstart Radnet Inc., founded by ex-Lotus employees, continues to throw the gauntlet down in the Web groupware market, eschewing the client-side story that market leaders -- Lotus, Microsoft and Netscape -- hold dear. Radnet's proposition for the WebShare groupware development platform is this: rapid development capability and a platform that works with any Web browser and any back-end database. "They're two years ahead of [the competitors] with understanding what's happening with Web application development," claims Paula Boyle, senior analyst with Kinetic Information, Waltham, Mass.

Version 2.0, due the end of this quarter, ups the feature ante with bidirectional replication for laptops, Java/ActiveX support and a WYSIWYG application builder. Radnet calls the WebShare Mobile portion of its groupware suite for laptops a "mini-server" because it accesses both logic and data. This is more than a linguistic dodging of the word 'client,'" says Boyle. "The browser is still the point of reference."

Radnet is also ramping up internally and expects to grow from 35 employees to more than 85 by year-end. At press time, the firm was near to closing a round of venture capital funding for over $10 million, says Stanley Miller, VP of finance. Still unresolved is a lawsuit filed by Lotus against Radnet CEO and President Don Bulens, who headed Lotus' business partner program, for allegedly violating his employment agreement. Bulens has filed a countersuit.