Business intelligence dashboards provider iDashboards today announced a strategic partnership with reporting and performance management software provider Actuate Corp.
The sales and marketing alliance will round out Actuate's reporting functionality with iDashboards' best-of-breed dashboard technology, while providing iDashboards access to Actuate's base of approximately 5,500 customers, said Dave Ferguson, director of business development at iDashboards, in an interview with Managing Automation.
Actuate's BI reporting platform includes what it described as a full suite of ad hoc query and Web-based collaborative reporting capabilities, as well as spreadsheet and analytics reporting products. iDashboards can bring enterprise dashboard capabilities to Actuate software, essentially providing a full-featured user interface that matches the richness of Actuate's operational reporting capabilities, the companies said.
"Actuate has been looking for ways to expand the value of our platform, of the core services we provide," Jeff Morris, senior director of product marketing at Actuate, told Managing Automation.
"iDashboards had been a pioneer in the development of the Adobe Flash and Flex-based dashboards capabilities our customers are seeking," Morris said of the alliance, which is part of Actuate's recently expanded Technology Alliances program. Other vendors with which Actuate has forged similar partnerships include spreadsheet modeling provider A3 Solutions, mobile BI supplier Webalo, and data visualization software developer Kearen Corp.
Ferguson said the two companies met at Gartner's business intelligence conference earlier this year, and both recognized a complementary fit.
"Essentially, the two products complement each other," Ferguson said. An organization's operational reports, as Ferguson put it, contain volumes of data, and dashboards help to extract and view the data relevant to a given user at a given point. iDashboards, he said, can pull the necessary KPIs up for a user, from the data contained in Actuate reports.
With a combination of iDashboards and Actuate software, Morris explained, users can look at a particular metric on the dashboard, such as an increase in product sales, click on that element, and navigate to an underlying Actuate report for comprehensive operational data on that metric.
Actuate's customer base of 5,500 companies includes 20% to 25% manufacturers, including a recently inked deal with automotive manufacturer Suzuki.
Formed in 2003, iDashboards, which recorded revenue growth of more than 500% year over year in the first half of 2007, currently has about 250 customers, including manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Georgia Pacific, and International Paper.
AMR Research recently predicted that North American companies will spend $23.8 billion in 2007 on BI and performance management technology, including software, hardware, labor (internal and external), and integration services, a year-to-year increase of nearly 9%.