News

Actuate antes up for BI performance management play

• By Stephen Swoyer
• January 23, 2006

Last week, Actuate made its second BI performance management-related move in 12 months, nabbing performancesoft, a provider of corporate performance management products and services, in an all-cash transaction valued at $16.5 million. Analysts say the performancesoft acquisition could be a boon to Actuate in a couple of ways: it fleshes out the company’s performance management stack, and it also gives Actuate cross-selling opportunities into performancesoft’s customer base.

The acquisition also gives Actuate an analytic dashboard. “Dashboards and scorecards are the preferred applications to deliver executive-level information to manage corporate performance,” says Actuate CEO Pete Cittadini.

Performancesoft’s bread-and-butter product, pbViews, is a dashboard-based offering powered by an OLAP engine. It supports drill-down to real-time operational data. In addition, it’s pitched as a tool for both the analytically savvy (business analysts) and the not-so-analytically savvy (business executives). Add it all up, says Robert Lerner, a senior analyst for Current Analysis, and it looks like a sound move.

“Overall, the acquisition should be a good one for Actuate. The company needed to strengthen its corporate performance management capabilities, and performancesoft’s technology will enable Actuate to reap some immediate benefit, since the company’s pbViews can essentially be snapped into Actuate’s platform to give customers dashboard capabilities,” Lerner says. What’s more, he argues, performancesoft and pbViews should help retrofit Actuate’s spreadsheet-centric reporting line for CPM.

For more info, click here.