Actuate Gives Power To The People

Business-intelligence tools today are most often used by analysts with data-modeling experience or IT personnel who develop reports for business workers. This week, Actuate Corp. will debut a new release of its e.Spreadsheet that lets sales executives, financial controllers, production managers, and other users create their own reports.

E.Spreadsheet, a front-end query and reporting tool with a spreadsheet interface, works with Actuate's server software to deliver Web-based reports in a Microsoft Excel format. The release, in beta testing and due to ship in the first quarter of next year, provides a spreadsheet editor and a query wizard that let business users create their own reports. That reduces the workload on IT departments that manually create Excel reports and improves business-user productivity by eliminating the need to port data to Microsoft Excel.

"This will help IT deliver analytic capabilities to a very broad audience of the business users -- not power users, not casual users -- in a way that they want to have it," says Keith Gile, a Giga Information Group analyst.

Actuate will offer the new e.Spreadsheet software for $35,000 per CPU or $495 per named user.