Actuate Joins Eclipse, Starts Open-Source BI Project

Interesting... Actuate Joins Eclipse, Starts Open-Source BI Project has all the details.

From my understanding, Eclipse is an Open Source IDE that can support a number of environments, but focuses alomost exclusively on Java. IBM is a huge backer, and pushes the technology.

As for the project itself, from the Project Proposal:

Initially, the Project will focus on leveraging the Eclipse platform to provide infrastructure and tools for the designing, deploying, generating and viewing of reports in an organization. Over time, the creation of additional projects is anticipated and encouraged to address additional aspects of business intelligence, such as Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, Extract Transform and Load (ETL) tools and so forth.

which seems to focus on Actuate's strengths. Fair enough. As for the planned features:

Reports extract data from a data source or sources, perform manipulations and calculations on the data to answer business questions, and present the results as information in a formatted and convenient form for the business user to use. This information is then typically used for operational or decision support purposes within an organization. Reports vary dramatically in size, content and complexity and will include or combine characteristics such as:

• Listings of information (Example: Transactions in an account)
  
• Sorting, grouping and aggregation of data with and without subtotals (Example: A listing of all product sales for each sales person, grouped by state)
  
• Charts to present information in easy to understand formats (Example: Pie chart showing an investor's portfolio allocation by High Growth/Growth/Income/etc. categories)
  
• Matrix or cross-tab layouts (Example: Financial budget reports with cost codes as rows, columns for each month, and cells containing numerical data for that cost code/month)
  
• Delivery of information as one or a combination of web pages, PDF files, printed documents, Excel files, etc. (Example: Frequent flyer statement delivered as a web page online and a printed document in the mail)
  
• Precise, highly formatted layouts (Examples: Bank statements; utility bills; commission statements; invoices; government forms)
  
• Page navigation for long reports (Examples: Hundreds of pages corporate cell phone usage bill with First Page, Next Page, Goto Page, etc. buttons)
  
• Table of Contents (Example: Multi-page Investment Portfolio summary with Table of Contents to quickly navigate to Account Summary; Fund History; etc.)
  
• Keyword or content search within a report (Example: find information on a customer in a 1000 page customer account report)

All of a sudden it's pretty unexciting. A yawner in fact. Standard reporting suite (except no mention of integrating with a directory for authentication and securing reports?) with, a little suprisingly, nothing that would seperate it from any othe suites out there (probably by design, since reporting is Actuate's bread and butter.)

Looks to me like an announcement of an intention to provide an alternative to Reporting Services which matches its price.