Actuate Gets Into Analysis

Actuate Corp. is expanding beyond its enterprise-reporting roots with Actuate Analytics, multidimensional analysis software for business analysts and power users that will be available next month. The move is the latest among business-intelligence software vendors to expand their product lines as companies look to buy more business-intelligence software from fewer vendors.

Actuate is touting the ease-of-use characteristics of the software, including a customizable interface that can be tailored to a user's skill level and "cubes," multidimensional data stores, that can be customized for individuals' specific business-information needs. The data in the analytical system also can be linked to Web reports and spreadsheets produced by other Actuate applications.

With its analysis software, Actuate is pushing into areas dominated by the likes of Business Objects, Cognos, and MicroStrategy. Those vendors, in turn, have been expanding into Actuate's reporting turf: Business Objects recently completed its acquisition of Crystal Decisions, an enterprise reporting software vendor, while MicroStrategy debuted its MicroStrategy Report Services product last month.

Pricing for Actuate Analytics, sold as an option for Actuate's iServer platform, will start at $15,000 per CPU and $495 per developer.