Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ: BIRT), The BIRT Company™ and the leader in personalized analytics and insights, today announced the immediate availability of BIRT iHub F-Type.^™ The new software boosts open source BIRT developers’ productivity through free access to the features and power of the commercial BIRT iHub™ enterprise-grade deployment platform, with metered output capacity.

Previously, a developer using open source BIRT had to build a deployment infrastructure in the form of a custom report server in order to share content with individual end-users across multiple devices. In contrast, within the first 15 minutes of downloading BIRT iHub F-Type, a developer can import a BIRT report, schedule secure distribution, or export their report as a full-function Excel spreadsheet. Another feature very well-received by beta testers is the interactive personalization capabilities that are automatically enabled for end-users. Additionally, BIRT iHub F-Type enables developers to embed dynamic reports and visualizations in their own custom-developed applications.

Dan Schreck, a beta tester of BIRT iHub F-Type, and a developer who has produced 500+ reports over his five years of BIRT experience, had this to say: “The out-of-the-box functionality is really easy to use. I like the way it seamlessly works to interact, schedule, share, embed and even export BIRT content to Excel.”

“Actuate is now a subscription business,” said Pete Cittadini, President and CEO of Actuate. “As of July 1, 2014 new projects using BIRT and BIRT Analytics^™ products, as well as our Actuate Customer Communications Suite,^™ are now offered through subscription license exclusively. We believe BIRT iHub F-Type will be a key contributor to making Actuate a successful subscription business, and will put us on the right path to grow our business.”

“BIRT iHub F-Type delivers important capabilities at no cost to our growing BIRT developer community,” said Dylan Boudraa, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Actuate.  “This new freemium software dramatically increases developer productivity by streamlining the process of managing, scheduling, sharing, integrating, and securely delivering BIRT reports and visualizations for end-user interaction.”

How BIRT iHub F-Type works

The shift to a “subscription economy” over the past few years – in which consumers buy app functionality by subscription with payments stepped to match usage – is leading the enterprise software market to the same model. Most freemium software – such as Splunk, GitHub, Skype, and Dropbox – provides a free version of premium commercial software that allows users to access basic functionality cost-free, and then purchase advanced functionality as needed.

In the case of BIRT iHub F-Type, rather than throttling the volume of data input as Splunk does, the volume of daily data output is limited to a level suitable for many developers’ needs, while placing no limit on data input. Developers will get 50MB free, per day, of data output capacity that can be used to deploy hundreds of reports containing thousands of tables and visualizations each day.

When daily output volume exceeds the free capacity, developers have the easy option to buy additional output capacity by subscription, from right inside BIRT iHub F-Type. In order to gauge how much data will be consumed by the end-users, a developer can exceed the daily capacity twice before the daily limit is enforced.

Benefits and key features of BIRT iHub F-Type

BIRT iHub F-Type is designed to manage and distribute content that has been created using open source BIRT or Actuate’s commercial BIRT Designer Pro IDE. BIRT iHub F-Type provides access to the full feature set of the BIRT iHub commercial deployment platform.

With BIRT iHub F-Type, developers can:

• Boost productivity through automated self-service content automation – no need to build scheduling and email distribution using custom code.
• Save time by automatically enabling users to customize their own content. Developers no longer need to create endless variations of reports for each user.
• Securely share data at a granular level, eliminating the need to build a management platform for BIRT content.
• Provide native Excel format complete with formulas and pivot tables for users who want it. No need to create a parallel Excel-centric infrastructure.
• Integrate or embed content into web or mobile applications quickly and seamlessly by leveraging JavaScript API.

For developers who need to deploy many reports to a small number of users, or few reports to many users – for instance on a departmental level – the free BIRT iHub F-Type will do the job. Then, when those developers need to ramp up based on customer demand internally or externally, they can buy additional capacity through subscription, from directly inside the product.

For extremely large enterprise projects, including customer facing applications, users have the choice of buying additional output capacity inside BIRT iHub F-Type, or moving to the enterprise grade BIRT iHub deployment platform, which adds clustering for high-availability and scalability, as well as multi-tenancy capabilities.

To download your free F-Type today:  

BIRT iHub F-Type is available today for download at http://www.actuate.com/ftype. The freemium is distributed under Actuate’s commercial licensing terms. For those users who bump up against the 50MB daily maximum output limit, an introductory promotion offers a free additional 50MB of daily capacity to be utilized through December 31, 2014. For those who require higher volumes of data output, subscription upgrades are priced starting at $500 per month each, which provide a further 50MB of daily output capacity.

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(Image Credit: Brandon Morse)