Restaurant accesses critical back-of-house data and payroll information

Novato, CA (PRWEB) July 12, 2011

Ctuit Software, a leader in business intelligence software for restaurants, announced that Fat’s Restaurants selected Ctuit’s RADAR solution to gain insight into critical back-of-house data and process payroll information easily across its sites. Fat’s Restaurants owns and operates five restaurants in the Sacramento, California area and is the oldest restaurant company in Sacramento. It was founded by the late Frank Fat in 1939 and the restaurant that bears his name is in fact the oldest restaurant in the same location and operated by the same family in the Sacramento region.

Fat’s Restaurants required a solution to ensure that executives and management teams had access to the most up-to-date information from all five of its locations to track labor and sales. Historically, prior to Ctuit, the restaurant group had used simple spreadsheets and manually entered information which was time consuming, prone to errors and contained older data.

Fat’s Restaurants implemented Ctuit’s RADAR web-based solution and now, can easily download sales and labor information automatically from all of its sites. Payroll information is readily available to be processed with the solution. RADAR’s Labor Law and Break Compliance Module ensures the restaurant is in compliance with California’s complicated staffing laws including occurrence of meal breaks and when overtime and double time are introduced.

“The sophistication of Ctuit’s RADAR technology has made a positive impact at Fat’s Restaurants. With reports and trends generated from RADAR, our executive team can use that information to guide overall business strategy and decision-making,” commented Collin Fat, vice president and director of operations, Fat’s Restaurants. “In the hospitality industry, it’s all about taking care of people. In turn, the Ctuit people behind RADAR help us take care of tracking and analyzing our critical business information.”

“Fat’s Restaurants has been a dedicated and loyal client for several years. We look forward to continuing to provide the highest level of service to them,” said Rob D’Ambrosia, president and CEO, Ctuit Software. “Fat’s Restaurant has experienced the value of implementing RADAR to manage their entire business. The solution provides everyone from restaurant managers to executives a wealth of actionable tools to enhance positive change in their organization.”

Ctuit RADAR is a complete above-store, BI, Analytical and Financial reporting tool that gives the entire management team deep insight and control to quickly identify trends and operational issues. Ctuit RADAR users make informed, fact-based decisions critical to success.

About Ctuit Software

Ctuit Software Inc. was founded in San Rafael, California, in 2000 with a mission to develop and deliver Business Intelligence and Decision Support Infrastructure to the restaurant industry. Ctuit’s RADAR – extracts the critical data from sales, labor, and accounting that yields key intelligence upon which profitable business decisions are made. In addition, operational, financial and exception based reporting is available company-wide. With Ctuit RADAR – accounting, finance, marketing and operations can make changes to improve customer satisfaction, sales and margins. Ctuit Software is a private, employee owned company with its corporate office based in Novato, California. For more information, visit http://www.ctuit.com.

About Fat’s Restaurants

Fat’s Restaurants owns and operates five restaurants in the Sacramento, California area and is the oldest restaurant company in Sacramento. It was founded by the late Frank Fat in 1939 and the restaurant that bears his name is in fact the oldest restaurant in the same location and operated by the same family in the Sacramento region. For more information, visit http://www.fatsrestaurants.net/.

###

Tammy Smith
tammymsmith@ymail.com
415-279-8293
Email Information

Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/fat-restaurants-deploys-ctuit-radar-maximize-business-insight-070358695.html

Available Now! Espicom Business Intelligence’s new interactive medical market research and business planning tool for the medical device and medical technology industry.

Chichester, West Sussex, UK (PRWEB UK) 12 July 2011

Dashboard driven and rich in graphics, Medistat Interactive can easily mobilise key data for medical market research, immediately compare and contrast key health indicators, infrastructure and market data for multiple markets at the click of a button. Track changes to historical/forecast data, export the data to other programs or create pdfs of charts and tables for inclusion in plans and presentations.

Whether it’s fast access through one of the many pre-defined tabs or the easy-to-use custom report builder, Medistat Interactive has complete control over the data, making it work quickly and efficiently.

Medistat Interactive provides the strategic intelligence to support key investment, business planning and marketing decisions. Easily review all statistics and forecasts for a particular market.

Quickly and easily assess your company’s performance against actual market figures or monitor regional/national sales offices and the work of specialist sales agents.

With actual figures and reliable forecasts, use Medistat Interactive to assess the medical market analysis on specific medical technology areas in the context of other health indicators.

Use Medistat Interactive to track trends in past performance and assess future prospects with our unique 5-year forecasts for key indicators.

For over 30 years, Espicom has been the leader in analysing medical device and equipment markets worldwide. Its reputation as a provider of reliable and thorough information is well founded and its services are used by leading healthcare companies in more than 50 markets.

For screenshots and a free information pdf on Medistat Interactive, please contact Victoria McVeigh or visit http://www.espicom.com/misf

About Espicom:

Espicom Business Intelligence is a highly-regarded and established provider of business intelligence services. Founded in 1982 as MDIS Publications Ltd, the company changed its name to Espicom in 1992. Initially a publisher in a wide range of industries such as power generation and telecommunications, we now focus on the global pharmaceutical and medical device sectors.

The company is privately owned and is headquartered in Tangmere, near Chichester, on the south coast of the UK, with an office (Espicom Inc) in Princeton, NJ, USA.

Contact:

Victoria McVeigh

Espicom Business Intelligence

+44(0)1243 756011

http://www.espicom.com

###

Victoria McVeigh
Espicom Business Intelligence
+44(0)1243 756011
Email Information

Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/medistat-interactive-world-class-medical-market-research-business-080221437.html

Every year, the research firm Business Applications Research Center (BARC) conducts the largest survey of BI tool usage. The survey, which draws responses from more than 3,000 BI professionals worldwide, takes 30 minutes to complete and delivers a treasure-trove of information about the characteristics of BI deployments by vendor product.

Among the many highlights from last year’s survey, the research shows that there is a difference in BI success rates and satisfaction between departmental and enterprise BI deployments, small and large BI vendors, and small and large user organizations. The obvious conclusion, to quote the 1960s classic by E.F. Schumacher, is that “small is beautiful.”

Here are some highlights from last year’s summary that all survey participants receive:

• Scope. Business benefits are more likely to be achieved if projects go live quickly. There is a steady fall off as initial roll out times rise. The small number of projects that took more than two years to roll out achieved few business benefits.
• Small Vendors. Customers of small or niche vendors, such Board, Jedox, and Cubeware, had the highest benefit ratio scores.
• Benefit Keys. Companies wishing to maximize benefits should focus on 1) support quality 2) implementation time 3) query response time and 4) breadth of deployment, in that order.
• Goal Achievement. Customers of large BI vendors are less likely to achieve project goals than those of small vendors, with the notable exception of IBM TM-1. For example, fewer than three percent of SAP BW/BEx Suite and SAP BusinessObjects WebI users report that their projects had exceeded goals. Microsoft customers reported the highest levels of goal achievement.
• License Fees. There is little correlation between license fee expenditure and achievement of BI project goals.
• Product Complaints. SAP BW customers reported the most product complaints, especially with query performance, while Bissantz and IBM Cognos TM1 had the fewest. Qliktech had the fewest complaints about slow queries.
• Evaluations. Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services and Reporting Services and IBM Cognos were the products most likely to be evaluated. Larger companies evaluate more products from larger vendors.
• Implementation fees. SAP BW/BEx customers had median implementation fees of $127,000 followed by Oracle Hyperion with $85,000, IBM Cognos with $66,000, and Microstrategy at $53,000.
• Win Rates. In competitive evaluations, TARGIT had the highest win rate of 82 percent, followed by Pentaho with 77 percent. At the other extreme, Oracle OBIEE had a win rate of 37 percent.

If you are in the market for a BI tool or want to know how your tool stacks up against the rest, then I’d recommend completing this year’s BI Survey 10 and getting the summary results, which are free. You can take the survey by clicking HERE.

Article source: http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/eckerson/archives/2011/04/the_bi_survey_1.php

For the past twenty years, application architects have debated whether to deploy software applications on clients or servers or some combination of the two. This debate has spanned a half-dozen different types of computing platforms, from mainframes and minicomputers in the 1970s and 1980s to desktop and client/server systems in the 1990s, and to the Web and Web services in the 2000s. Today, application architects now have a new platform upon which to wage their perennial debate: mobile devices.

Mobile devices resurrect the notion of “fat client” that had largely disappeared with the advent of Web-based computing. Fat clients generally offer fast performance and superior user graphical interfaces, while Web-based applications–which execute application code on a remote server–generally simplify development, deployment, and administration.

Over time, fat and thin client architectures generally blur into distributed architectures where application processing is spread across clients, application servers, and databases. In fact, a good portion of many Web-based applications today execute on the client via browser-based Java applets, Active X controls, DHTML and AJAX, or Flash plug-ins, making so-called Web “thin” clients a tad “heavier” than is generally known.

Vendor Debates

As a new application platform, mobile devices pose a stark architectural choice for organizations that want to deploy mobile BI applications. They can either build exquisite-looking, native BI applications for each mobile device, or they can build a single browser-based application that runs the same on all devices.

During the past year, every BI vendor has had an intense, internal debate about which mobile BI architecture to adopt. Some vendors, such as MicroStrategy and Mellmo (makers of Roambi), believe that users will demand feature-rich, device-specific mobile applications, while others, such as Transpara and QlikTech, are betting that browser-based mobile applications will eventually steal the day. Many others, including IBM Cognos, have decided to hedge their bets and produce offerings in both camps.

User organizations need to carefully evaluate the mobile BI architecture adopted by their mobile BI vendors. They need to understand the ramifications that their vendors’ chosen architecture will have on ease of use, adoption, deployment times, maintenance, and total cost of ownership, among other things.

Let’s take a look at the two mobile BI architectures and then examine their hybrid offshoots.

Native Mobile Applications

There are three main advantages to running native mobile applications: 1) performance 2) user experience and 3) offline access. Performance is exceptional with native mobile applications because the data that comprises a report or dashboard is downloaded and stored on the device. Fast performance makes applications very responsive and highly interactive.

The user experience of native applications is also superior. This is due in part to fast performance but also because native applications exploit unique features and functions inherent in the devices, such as touch screens that support hand gestures or an accelerometer that lets users rotate the device to switch between a portrait and landscape view. Anyone who has ever used an Apple iPhone or iPad understands the unique experiences these devices make possible. Having tasted paradise, most don’t want to go back.

Finally, because native applications store data locally, they work even when the device is not connected to a network. Offline access is critical for executives who spend a lot of time in the air or salespeople whose districts don’t offer reliable network connections, or plant managers who might lose connectivity in the bowels of a manufacturing plant.

Browser-based Applications

Conversely, browser-based mobile BI applications have three unique advantages: 1) portability 2) data consistency and 3) security.

Rather than write an application for each individual mobile device, developers can write a single HTML/Javascript application that runs the same on any device that supports a browser, virtually unchanged. Although there are slight differences among browsers that must be accounted for during development, in general, developers can build once and deploy everywhere, and this includes desktops, laptops, and conference room or operation center flat-screen monitors. This is sweet music to developers and IT administrators who would rather maintain one application than a half-dozen variants, one for each type of device.

In a browser-based mobile BI applicaiton, the application and data reside on a remote server, which means that nothing is downloaded to the device. This prevents data from getting out of sync or the creation of analytic silos. Individuals all access the same server-side reports and data. Additionally, it is easier to enforce security since all data, code, and passwords are managed centrally. If a device is lost or stolen, hackers can’t walk off with sensitive corporate data.

Downsides and Hybrid Solutions

Interestingly, the advantages of each architectural approach represent the downsides of the other approach. Not surprisingly, given the market potential for mobile BI, vendors are quickly plugging the gaps in their defenses and delivering hybrid solutions that maximize the benefits of their preferred architectural approach and minimize the downsides.

Hybrid Native Applications. BI vendors that have opted to ride the native mobile BI application wave have already made great strides in improving their applications’ portability, data consistency, and security. For example, some now offer universal application templates that can be compiled into the native languages of all major devices without changes. This means developers only have to create an application once to run it on any device.

To improve data consistency, some vendors now configure native mobile BI applications to download fresh data upon startup or on demand. And they’ve given remote administrators the ability to selectively wipe device disks if a device is lost or stolen to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data and require users to log in when the application is used offline.

Hybrid Web Applications. Browser-based mobile BI developers have created workarounds to improve the performance and usability of their applications. For instance, some now cache small amounts of data on the device (e.g., a report) to improve application responsiveness. Others are extending their browser-applications in the short-term by writing to a mobile device’s application programming interface (API), which enable browser-based applications to exploit some unique mobile features, such as touch screens, accelerometers, and gyroscopes. Of course, this also creates a new version of the Web-based application that developers have to maintain. In the long-term, these vendors are betting that HTML5 will deliver these same features using industry standard HTML.

It’s likely that the future of mobile BI is some form of distributed computing comprised of of the hybrid applications described above. But whatever the form, it behooves organizations to understand the architectural choice that they or their mobile BI vendor have made and its ramifications on application usability and internal resources.

Article source: http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/eckerson/archives/2011/04/architecting_fo.php

This is the first of four-part blog series on cloud computing for BI professionals.

There is a lot of confusion about cloud computing, even among professionals in the field. But that’s true of any new, fast moving technology in which there are a lot of new technologies and methods. After reading a few definitions of cloud computing that caused me to nod off at my keyboard, I created a simpler one:
Shared, online compute resources that you rent from a service provider and dynamically configure yourself.

Let’s unpack this definition a bit:

• Shared: You share compute resources with other groups or companies, even your direct competitors! Obviously, this raises security and privacy concerns.
• Online: You access the compute resources via a Web browser or a programmatic Web application programming interface. In this respect, cloud computing delivers online “services”.
• Compute resources: Compute resources consist of the infrastructure (servers, storage, and networks), development tools, and applications. Basically, the whole stack, accessible via a Web browser or service call.
• Rent: You only pay for what you use and you can terminate the service at any time (although there may be some exit fees.) This is value-based pricing. Cloud infrastructure vendors generally charge by the hour while cloud software providers generally charge by user per month.
• Service provider: A service provider could be your internal IT department (private cloud) or an external company (public cloud).
• Dynamically configure: Unlike traditional hardware and software, you don’t purchase, install, test, tune, and maintain cloud-based resources. With cloud-based infrastructure, you simply configure a virtual image of your compute environment (hardware, storage, network) using a Web browser. With cloud-based software, you simply configure your application using a Web browser to conform with your branding and workflow requirements.

Three Services

As you probably have already surmised, cloud computing is divided into three classes of services, each of which can be applied to the business intelligence market: 1) software as a service (applications) 2) platform-as-a-service (application development), and infrastructure as a service (compute resources). (See figure 1.)

Figure 1. Three Types of Cloud Services with BI Examples (click to expand)

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivers applications. SaaS was first popularized by Salesforce.com, which was founded in 1996 to deliver online sales applications to small- and medium-sized businesses with few or no IT resources and few capital resources. Salesforce.com now has 92,000 customers of all sizes and has spawned a multitude of imitators. Within the BI market, many startups and established BI players are offering SaaS BI services, although the uptake of such services is slower than expected. (See “Expectations Versus Reality in the Cloud: Understanding the Dynamics of the SaaS BI Market.”) SaaS BI vendors including Birst, PivotLink, GoodData, Indicee, Rosslyn Analytics, and SAP, among others.

• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) enables developers to build applications online. PaaS services provide development environments, such as programming languages and databases, so developers can create and deliver applications without having to purchase and install hardware. In the BI market, the SaaS BI vendors (above) are actually PaaS BI vendors, which is the primary reason why growth of SaaS BI is slow. Before you can consume a SaaS BI application, you have to build a data mart, which is often tedious and highly customized work since it involves integrating data from multiple, unique sources, cleaning and standardizing the data, and modeling and transforming the data. SaaS BI vendors are peddling a finished product when they are actually selling a custom PaaS development effort.

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provides online computing resources (servers, storage, and networking) which customers use to augment or replace their existing compute resources. In 2006, Amazon popularized IaaS when it began renting space in its own data center using virtualization services to outside parties. Some BI vendors are beginning to offer software components within public cloud or hosted environments. For example, analytic database vendors Vertica and Teradata are now available as services within Amazon EC2, while Kognitio offers a hosted service. ETL vendors Informatica and SnapLogic offer services in the cloud.

Key Characteristics of the Cloud

Virtualization. Virtualization is the foundation of cloud computing. You can’t do cloud computing without virtualization; but virtualization by itself doesn’t constitute cloud computing.

Virtualization abstracts or virtualizes the underlying compute infrastructure using a piece of software called a hypervisor. With virtualization, you create virtual servers (or virtual machines) to run your applications. Your virtual server can have a different operating system than the physical hardware upon which it is running. For the most part, users no longer have to worry whether they have the right operating system, hardware, and networking to support an application. Virtualization shields from the underlying complexity (as long as the IT department has created appropriate virtual machines for them to use.)

With virtualization, organizations can run multiple, heterogeneous virtual servers on a single physical server to maximize utilization, or they can run a single virtual server on multiple physical servers to increase scalability. Because virtualization decouples applications from the underlying hardware, IT administrators can migrate applications to new hardware without having to reinstall software. They also can spawn multiple instances of a single application using virtual servers and run them in parallel on a single physical server to improve application performance and throughput. (See figure 2.)

Figure 2. Virtualization Use Cases (click to expand)

Left: heterogeneous system images and applications run on a single server, maximizing server utilization. Middle: a single image runs across multiple physical machines, increasing scalability. Right: multiple instances of an application run in parallel on a single machine, increasing efficiency.

In short, virtualization increases the flexibility, scalability, efficiency, and availability of data center resources, and it dramatically lowers data center costs by enabling the IT department to consolidate servers and reduce power, cooling, space, and staffing overhead.

To the Cloud: Dynamic Provisioning

Browser Interface. To turn virtualization into cloud computing, you need to add software that enables business users to dynamically provision their own virtual servers and use the servers as long as they desire.

For instance, developers using a Web browser can configure a custom virtual server to support a new development and test bed. Or, they can select a virtual image (i.e., server and applications) from a library of virtual images created in advance by the IT department. Once the developers are finished using the virtual images, they “release” them. Thus, developers no longer need to submit requests to the IT department for servers, storage, and networking capacity. They either configure their own virtual machine or select one from a library that meets their application’s processing requirements. They no longer have to wait for purchasing and legal to execute a purchase order or the IT department to install, tune, test, and deploy the systems.

Services Interface. To make the leap to cloud computing, you also need a services interface so administrators can programmatically provision servers based on a schedule or events (e.g., an ETL job that begins). Administrators use Web services interfaces to support auto-scaling, failover, and backups.

With auto-scaling, a BI administrator uses a cloud services interface to automatically provision and release virtual BI servers during the course of a day to efficiently allocate processing power among servers to support various BI workloads. For example, at 2 a.m. in a typical BI environment, the system fires up an ETL server and database server to run nightly ETL jobs, while at 4 a.m. it releases the ETL server and provisions a BI server to process and burst daily reports. At 10 a.m. it provisions an additional BI server and database server to handle peak usage. Failovers and backups work much the same way.

Cloud Management Software. Cloud computing also requires management software to help IT administrators keep track of all the moving parts in a virtualized environment. Cloud management software enables IT administrators to define systems-level policies (e.g., security and usage), create and manage virtual images which enforce the policies, manage virtual server versions, monitor servers and performance, manage user roles and access, track usage, and manage chargebacks or accounting, among other things. There are a variety of vendors that offer cloud management software, including cloud data center providers, such as Amazon.com and Rackspace, and independent software vendors, such as Eucalyptus and RightScale.

Multi-tenancy

Another key characteristic of cloud computing (in particular, Software-as-a-Service) is that applications are multi-tenant, which means multiple users from different organizations run the same application code running on the same hardware. This is different from a traditional hosting or outsourcing environment in which each customer owns or rents a dedicated set of hardware and software in the service provider’s data center. The hosted model leads to a lot of wasted compute resources since customers only use their own compute resources even when other machines in the data center are idle. In contrast, multi-tenancy makes much more efficient use of hardware and software resources, delivering economies of scale that make cloud computing an attractive business model to service providers, as long as they can attract enough customers.

One problem with multi-tenancy is that applications must be designed from scratch to support it. Multi-tenancy creates virtual partitions within the application and database for each distinct customer. Customers usually configure the application to match their unique branding and workflow requirements. On the data side, customer data is either interleaved by row and separated using unique identifiers or partitioned into separate tables or database instances.

Legacy applications not designed for multi-tenancy have to fudge it. Either the service provider must create dedicated environments for each customer, which is highly inefficient (e.g., the old application service provider model) or they use virtualization software to run parallel instances of each application (e.g., a virtual appliance.) In some respects, the virtual appliance approach is more flexible than multi-tenancy because the virtual appliances can be ported to run on almost any hardware. (See figure 3.)

Figure 3. Application Architectures (click to expand)

Traditional on-premise software (far left) tightly couples logic and data to hardware in a LAN environment. A hosted environment (second from left) gives each customer their own dedicated hardware and software resources in a third party data center which they access via a virtual private network. A true multi-tenant environment (second from right) partitions a single application and database so different customers get their own unique views while sharing the same application, database, hardware, and network connection. A virtual appliance model (far right) enables legacy software not written for multi-tenancy to run parallel instances, essentially virtualizing multi tenancy.

SaaS BI vendors have long waged battles over whether their respective software is truly multi-tenant or not. The virtual appliance model gives legacy software vendors venturing into SaaS a more equal footing on which to compete.

Summary

This blog defined cloud computing and discussed some of its more salient attributes. However, there are several ways to deploy the cloud, and these deployment options have significant implications on costs, security, and staffing. The next blog in this series will discuss the differences between public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid clouds and show how an organization might architect its BI environment to leverage public cloud offerings.

*******
By the way, I’m once again speaking at CFO Magazine’s Corporate Performance Management Conference, which is being held September 11-12 in Dallas Texas. I’ll be delivering a presentation on Monday about the future of business intelligence, using my BI Delivery Framework 2020 as the basis for the presentation. On Tuesday afternoon, I’ll be delivering a half-day seminar on performance dashboards. If you are interested in registering for the all-access pass, use the code LF1000 to get a $1,000 discount. Cool!

Article source: http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/eckerson/archives/2011/07/what_is_cloud_c.php

SAN MATEO, Calif., Jul 12, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) –
Actuate Corporation


/quotes/zigman/72777 BIRT
-1.39%



, The people behind BIRT(R)
and the leading open source Business
Intelligence (BI) vendor, today announced it will deliver its second
quarter 2011 financial results on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011.

Actuate’s management will host a conference call to discuss the
company’s second quarter 2011 financial results on Tuesday, August 2nd
at 2:00 p.m. PT (5:00 p.m. ET). A live webcast of the conference call,
with an accompanying slide presentation, will be available at the
investor relations section of the Actuate website at
http://www.actuate.com/investor .
A replay will be archived for 30 days thereafter.

For live phone access to the conference call please dial 877-407-8035
(+1 201-689-8035 for international participants) and use conference ID
number 375401.

Actuate — The people behind BIRT

Actuate founded and co-leads the Eclipse BIRT open source project.
ActuateOne is a unified suite of products for rapidly developing and
deploying BIRT-based custom Business
Intelligence applications and information applications. Applications
built with ActuateOne provide one user experience regardless of task or
skill level; are supported by one server for any deployment including
cloud and are built with one BIRT design that can access and integrate
any data source – including high volume print streams. ActuateOne adds
rich data
visualizations, including interactivity, dashboards,
analytics,
and deployment options to web and mobile BIRT applications, helping
organizations drive revenue through higher customer satisfaction and
improved operational performance.

Actuate has over 4,700 customers globally in a diverse range of business
areas including financial services and the public sector. Founded in
1993, Actuate is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with offices
worldwide. Actuate is listed on NASDAQ under the symbol BIRT. For more
information, visit the company’s web site at
www.actuate.com
or visit the BIRT community at
www.birt-exchange.com .

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward Looking Statements: The statements
contained in this press release that are not purely historical are
forward looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the
Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These include statements
regarding Actuate’s expectations, beliefs, hopes, intentions or
strategies regarding the future. All such forward-looking
statements are based upon information available to Actuate as of the
date hereof, and Actuate disclaims any obligation to update or revise
any such forward-looking statements based on changes in expectations or
the circumstances or conditions on which such expectations may be based.
Actual results could differ materially from Actuate’s current
expectations. Factors that could cause or contribute to such
differences include, but are not limited to, the general spending
environment for information technology products and services in general
and Rich Internet Application, performance management, and print stream
software in particular, quarterly fluctuations in our revenues and other
operating results, our ability to expand our international operations,
our ability to successfully compete against current and future
competitors, the impact of future acquisitions (including the Xenos
Group Inc. acquisition) on the Company’s financial and/or operating
condition, the ability to increase revenues through our indirect
distribution channels, general economic and geopolitical uncertainties
and other risk factors that are discussed in Actuate’s Securities and
Exchange Commission filings, specifically Actuate 2010 Annual Report on
Form 10-K filed on March 11, 2011.

Copyright (C) 2011 Actuate Corporation. All rights reserved. Actuate and
the Actuate logo are registered trademarks of Actuate Corporation and/or
its affiliates in the U.S. and certain other countries. All other
brands, names or trademarks mentioned may be trademarks of their
respective owners.

SOURCE: Actuate Corporation

        Actuate Corporation
        Ingrid Ebeling, 650-645-3555
        ir@actuate.com

Copyright Business Wire 2011

/quotes/zigman/72777

Add BIRT to portfolio

BIRT

Article source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/actuate-to-announce-second-quarter-2011-results-on-august-2nd-2011-07-12?reflink=MW_news_stmp

IDG News Service - MicroStrategy is rolling out a cloud-based service that allows the exchange of data between Facebook and enterprise applications, the BI (business intelligence) vendor announced Tuesday during its user conference in Monte Carlo.

Gateway for Facebook transforms Facebook’s “social graph,” the term for the collective interrelationships between users of the site, into a relational format, allowing ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management) and other applications to work with the data, according to Microstrategy. Enterprise applications can also send information out to Facebook.

Many features of Gateway for Facebook focus on performance and availability. A set of query algorithms combines overlapping queries, reducing the load on Facebook’s servers. A governing mechanism tracks query loads and puts on the brakes if it appears Gateway will exceed Facebook’s daily limits. The system also includes a database that holds social graph data, so it remains available if Facebook itself is having access issues, according to Microstrategy.

The announcement drew a measured response from one observer.

“Facebook provides both the social graphs and interest graphs that marketers and sales people need to improve their lead generation and campaigns,” said analyst Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research. “Patching to Facebook’s open graph isn’t anything special. It’s what you do with it that’s the secret sauce.”

Moreover, tracking interrelationships on social sites is only part of the opportunity for companies, said Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson. “The bigger part of it is sentiment analysis and text analytics.”

Pricing and availability information for Gateway weren’t immediately available.

It is apparently just one of three products MicroStrategy is rolling out as part of a “social intelligence for the enterprise” strategy. It will be joined by Wisdom for Enterprise, a “social analytics engine for Facebook enabling analysis and segmentation of your fan base,” according to the company’s website. A third product, Alert for Enterprise, will provide targeted marketing campaigns.

Also Tuesday, MicroStrategy announced the general availability of MicroStrategy Cloud, a managed service for running BI, social and other applications.

The service allows access to MicroStrategy’s full BI platform and provides elastic scalability up to tens of thousands of users, according to a statement.

Customers can host their databases on the service or use it to connect to back-end systems. It will be offered in a range of price categories, from a “highly cost-effective base service” to an “extreme high performance enterprise” edition that can handle hundreds of terabytes of data, MicroStrategy said.

MicroStrategy can get customers up and running in as little as two days, compared to the years it can take to build out an on-premises BI infrastructure, the company claimed

Article source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218338/MicroStrategy_gateway_links_Facebook_to_enterprise_apps?taxonomyId=77

BOSTON, MA–(Marketwire – Jul 12, 2011) – Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE: HHS), today announced the publication of new research reports from its Sales Effectiveness, Collaboration and Integrated Communications, Manufacturing, and Business Intelligence research practices.

“Chance Favors the Prepared Mind – Understanding the Science of Sales Intelligence” by Peter Ostrow, Research Director, Sales Effectiveness practice at the Aberdeen Group, details how leading organizations determine the best sales opportunities within a rising tide of unfiltered intelligence, and drive 28.4% year-over-year increase in annual company revenue, compared to 0.5% decrease for all others. By deploying the proven sales intelligence capabilities and enablers associated with optimal revenue growth, quota attainment and customer retention, companies can envision themselves achieving the same Best-in-Class results, through such a holistic approach to managing key prospect and customer data. To obtain a complimentary copy of the report, made available with the support of Dow Jones and Lattice Engines visit: http://www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp?spid=30410182cid=7009camp=2.

Also authored by Peter Ostrow, the “Sales Forecasting: How Top Performers Leverage the Past, Visualize the Present, and Improve Their Future Revenue” research study details how leading organizations have been able to provide more accurate sales forecasts of top-line revenue and drive a year-over-year increase of 13.8% in company profit margin, compared to 2.5% for all others. A focus on key metrics influencing forecasting accuracy tackles the main pressure driving organizations in this study; insufficient knowledge of prospects/customers already in sales funnel, to determine likelihood to close the deal. To obtain a complimentary copy of the report made available part by Birst, Visual Insight, Sage and Cloud9 Analytics visit: http://www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp?spid=30410182cid=7026camp=2.

“Conquering the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt of Managing Integrated Communications“, written by Hyoun Park, Research Analyst for Aberdeen’s Collaboration and Integrated Communications practice, demonstrates the key strategies and tactics associated with effectively managing an increasingly complex landscape of enterprise communications. The report also outlines how Best-in-Class companies created an environment that provided greater flexibility, improved configuration and deployment capabilities, infrastructure support, and secure compliance. As a result, these companies reduced communications maintenance costs by over 45% and expanded compliant usage of collaboration and social media tools throughout their organization.
To obtain a complimentary copy of this report, made available in part by Actiance, Icewarp, and Polycom, please visit: http://www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp?spid=30410182cid=7024camp=2.

“Energy Intelligence: Driving Optimization with Visibility,” authored by Nuris Ismail, Senior Research Associate, and Matthew Littlefield, Senior Research Analyst for Aberdeen’s Manufacturing research practice, highlights advancements made by top-performing organizations in managing energy across enterprise. With increasing energy prices, manufacturing executives can’t ignore the impact of energy costs on the bottom line. Now more than ever it is necessary to understand a plant’s energy needs and eliminate wasteful energy consumption. Indeed, sustainability has evolved from a social expectation to an economic imperative. This study identifies the strategies, business processes and technology enablers that are essential to supporting an enterprise energy intelligence initiative. To obtain a complimentary copy of this report made available in part by SAP and Hara, please visit: http://www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp?spid=30410182cid=7027camp=2.

“The Analytical Masses: Building Self-Service Insight for Line-of-Business Decisions” prepared by Michael Lock, Senior Research Analyst for Aberdeen’s Business Intelligence (BI) practice, demonstrates how BI and analytical tools have become more relevant to, and used by, a diverse group of non-technical business users. With the ability to gather relevant business data, apply functional specific knowledge to that data, and deliver timely business insights based on its analysis, the business analytics philosophy is now a priority for many organizations. This report focuses on the connection between a burgeoning analytical mindset and the line-of-business activity required to survive and thrive in a rapidly changing marketplace, presenting a demonstrable connection between analytical adoption, pervasiveness, and engagement from line-of-business decision makers, and elevated business performance. To obtain a complimentary copy of this report, made available in part by Birst and Dimensional Insight visit: http://www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp?spid=30410182cid=7137camp=2.

About Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company

Aberdeen provides fact-based research and market intelligence that delivers demonstrable results. Having queried more than 30,000 companies in the past two years, Aberdeen is positioned to educate users to action: driving market awareness, creating demand, enabling sales, and delivering meaningful return-on-investment analysis. As the trusted advisor to the global technology markets, corporations turn to Aberdeen for insights that drive decisions.

As a Harte-Hanks Company, Aberdeen plays a key role of putting content in context for the global direct and targeted marketing company. Aberdeen’s analytical and independent view of the “customer optimization” process of Harte-Hanks (Information – Opportunity – Insight – Engagement – Interaction) extends the client value and accentuates the strategic role Harte-Hanks brings to the market. For additional information, visit Aberdeen or call (617) 854-5200, or to learn more about Harte-Hanks, call (800) 456-9748.

(C) 2011 Aberdeen Group, Inc., a Harte-Hanks Company
451 D Street, Suite 710
Boston, Massachusetts 02210-1928
Telephone: (617) 854-5200
Fax: (617) 723-7897
www.aberdeen.com

Article source: http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/aberdeen-publishes-sales-intelligence-forecasting-integrated-communications-energy-bi-nyse-hhs-1537161.htm