Actuate’s Newest Release of BIRT Analytics Adds Key Advanced Predictive Analytics for Business Analysts

New features bring data to life through pattern detection, decision trees, and campaign workflow definition to effectively analyze data and execute campaigns

SAN MATEO, Calif., June 25, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

Actuate Corporation( http://www.actuate.com ) (NASDAQ: BIRT), The BIRT Company(TM) – delivering more insights to more people than all BI companies combined, today announced the latest release of BIRT Analytics software specifically designed for business analysts. BIRT Analytics is the first product to enable advanced predictive analysis – through a variety of techniques – of data from any source. Companies who want the best combination of ease of use, analytic horsepower, and ability to process billions of data points buy BIRT Analytics for their business analysts to make predictions without coding.

Adding to its already rich set of capabilities for business analyst-driven predictive analytics, BIRT Analytics 4.2 sports three new advanced features: Association Rules for detecting purchase patterns over time (for instance in grocery receipts by and across customer segments); Decision Tree, which allows prediction of outcomes based on decision paths; and Campaign Workflow to enable you to effectively execute campaigns based on the analysis, and set up a process to improve them based on analyzing the results. “With BIRT Analytics we offer the best of all analytic worlds,” said Nobby Akiha, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Actuate. “The business analyst no longer has to be content with ‘predictive analytics lite’ – BIRT Analytics 4.2 provides the analytical horsepower of traditional statistical tools in an easy-to-use visual product that analyzes all types and sizes of data – including Big Data.”

Most products available today do only part of the predictive analytics job for specific audiences: A few perform simple discovery for select analysts; others are designed for statisticians who are trained to code predictive models. BIRT Analytics empowers business analysts to, independently, discover correlations and predict behaviors and outcomes through techniques like customer segmentation, next best offer, and vendor risk or customer loyalty.

BIRT Analytics empowers the business user to make data-informed competitive decisions today, and to communicate with customers/patients/clients based on that intelligence. With BIRT Analytics you can run various analytic techniques, design a campaign, predict the likely outcomes of campaigns, analyze the campaign results, and begin the cycle again, continually improving business results.

Delivers Big Data value much sooner than any Big Data project

The urgent need to predict a buyer’s behavior exists with or without Big Data. It exists across industries for both product manufacturers and service providers; in banking, health care, technology, government, consumer goods, and countless other specialties. Before the availability of BIRT Analytics, business unit analysts had to queue their project requests with IT departments or depend on data scientists to share insights gleaned from long exercises.

While the first of the three stages of Big Data Management (Organizing) is currently occupying the attention of IT in many organizations, the second (Visualizing & Analyzing) and third (Operationalizing) stages are critical to business units and their business analysts. In one solution BIRT Analytics gives this group a powerful set of techniques for predictive analysis, and a way to immediately operationalize – internally and externally – the gleaned insights. BIRT Analytics shows you the correlations, patterns, and predictions you need today to increase business effectiveness and profitability, effectively bringing static data to life. And, later, the analyses performed in BIRT Analytics can inform the objectives of the Organizing stage of Big Data Management.

Key features of BIRT Analytics 4.2( http://www.actuate.com/products/birt-user-experience/analytics )

-- BIRT Analytics 4.2 adds the following features and benefits:

o New automated analytic techniques – Association Rules and Decision Trees to enhance the predictive nature of the product; Association Rules is used for “Market Basket Analysis” while Decision Tree analysis is often applied to “next best offer” problems.

o Improvements to data loading and preparation, including the ability for users to add personal data such as that contained in spreadsheets, and combine it with traditional analytic sources such as corporate data warehouses, web site traffic and activity logs, and publicly available demographic information. BIRT Analytics also adds five data preparation techniques that automate the process of making data suitable for further analysis. These techniques are: Normalization, Linear, SoftMax, Logistical Scaling, and Remapping of Values. These techniques can prevent distortions in analysis and reduce computation time.

o Process automation through Campaign Management (to inform marketing automation tools like Marketo and Eloqua) and iWorkflow event execution and scheduling.

-- Faster display of performed analysis than any other product – billions of rows of data displayed at speed of thought, with interactive visualizations in less than 10 seconds to uncover new profit opportunities

-- No other product on the market delivers the unique combination of behind-the-scenes algorithmic power, ease of use, and sheer speed of BIRT Analytics, while bypassing the need for pre-modeling (pre-processing) of data.

“BIRT Analytics combined with the rest of the modules in the ActuateOne(R) BIRT-based product suite ties together internal and external data-oriented business management, and allows you to fulfill today’s mandate to manage by data for competitive advantage,” concluded Akiha.

Actuate – The BIRT Company(TM)( http://www.actuate.com ) Actuate founded and co-leads the BIRT open source project( http://www.birt-exchange.com/be/home ), which is used by over 2.5 million developers around the globe and serves as the foundation of the ActuateOne( http://www.actuate.com/resources/resource-center/?articleid=20549 )(R) platform. Applications built on ActuateOne deliver more business and consumer insights to more people than all BI companies combined - ensuring organizations are ready for the exponential growth of Big Data and the proliferation of touch devices.

The ActuateOne platform empowers developers to rapidly develop custom, BIRT-based business analytics( http://www.actuate.com/products/birt-user-experience/analytics/features-benefits )and customer communications( http://www.xenos.com/xe/home ) applications. ActuateOne applications built with one BIRT design can access and integrate any data, including unstructured sources. They provide one user experience regardless of skill level and are supported by one platform for any cloud, hybrid, on-premise, web, or touch device deployment.

Headquartered in Silicon Valley( http://www.actuate.com/company/contact-us ), Actuate has over 5,000 customers globally in a diverse range of business areas including financial services( http://www.actuate.com/customers-solutions/industry-solutions/financial-services ), technology( http://www.actuate.com/customers-solutions/industry-solutions/oem ) and the public sector( http://www.actuate.com/customers-solutions/industry-solutions/government ). Actuate is listed on NASDAQ under the symbol BIRT. For more information, visit www.actuate.com or engage with the BIRT community at www.birt-exchange.com.( http://www.birt-exchange.com )

Copyright (C) 2013 Actuate Corporation. All rights reserved. Actuate, ActuateOne, The BIRT Company, BIRT onDemand, BIRT Analytics, and the Actuate logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Actuate Corporation and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and certain other countries. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between Actuate and any other company. All other brands, names or trademarks mentioned may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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