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Open Source Blog
Actuate's open source intelligence
August 24, 2007
I'm just catching up on the news after a few days off being a parent and the first thing worth mentioning is this excellent Q&A my colleague Madan Sheina did with Actuate CEO Pete Cittadini on the BIRT project and the impact of open source on Actuate's business model.
Here's a taster:
Q. Is open source a gamble for Actuate?
A. Not really. It's a must for us. The cost of developing, marketing, and selling enterprise software is becoming too high to be a sustainable business these days. If we didn't do it our future wouldn't have looked that rosy.
Q. Isn't there a risk of open source cannibalizing your commercial BI products?
A. No, because we're not planning to open source any of our commercial server-based BI products now or in the foreseeable future. We're just commoditizing the development environment and don't mind giving that up to open source community.
Q. What do you make of your open source BI competitors?
A. I don't think the BI suite route that Pentaho is going down is the right way to go. They've accumulated a bunch of open source BI products. But we don't know of any enterprise that uses any of them. It all sounds like a PowerPoint reality. I believe JasperSoft, which is probably our nearest competitor, recently closed a Series D round of funding. I'm wondering if you're spending good money after the bad when you're financing a Series D. If Actuate generates $7m of open source revenue this year then both of these companies won't even come close to us.
Speaking of open source BI competitors, Computerwire subscribers can also read Madan's take on Ingres's new Icebreaker BI appliance, developed with JasperSoft.
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