Actuate Reviews

Pros

If you were lucky enough to end up with a large financial services company then you could hit your numbers.

Cons

If you did not it was only a matter of time before you realized it was time to move on. The products have a limited market. Lots haves vs haves not.

Advice to Senior Management

You should not have geo based teams, all named accounts and spread the wealth around.

Pros

The company still has that spark of an enterprise software company from the late 90's. Creative, independent with a eye to the future. CEO is well grounded and accessible if you pretend you're from New Jersey / NY. Got to be ready to be part of the "boys club" if you want to move up. Sales culture is typical of companies like this. Miss your number for a couple of quarters and you better be looking for a new job. Development is pretty closed off from the rest of the company (good/bad?). Marketing is actually a high point for them.

Cons

I worked from home. The company didn't embrace the remote worker idea to much. Hurt me in the end. I found the product space a little boring, with few exciting ideas coming from development. They were swimming through the current recession by going back to existing customers and "making them honest" on their software license/contract terms. This actually was the only revenue driver for the last 12 months and the company would be toast today if it weren't for the 15 years of license violations that they're now policing. It's almost like banked money they're now collecting. Customers are happy to get 50 cents on the dollar for their purchase back in 2004. It's a win-win, but with a mafia/IRS kind of twist...come clean and pay up, or we'll yank your license.

Advice to Senior Management

Find a buyer and get out of the market while you can. Oracle and SAP will crush you in 2 years. Otherwise, get lean and continue down the open source route. Prepare employees for the inevitable downsizing and cut them some options.

Pros

The products are good -- you can point to what you made and be proud. Also, there are lots of good people there. The company doesn't try to inflict an artificial culture on its people. If you are sick, they support you being out to get well. They seem to mostly keep the people they hire -- didn't seem to be much turnover.

Cons

Hard to get requirements or functional specs on product development., even when your job needs access to them -- didn't seem like they exist Embracing agile dev seemed to be just an excuse to fly by the seat of the pants... or maybe they had a plan (including specs & requirements?) and no longer felt like they needed to communicate it to other employees. Increasingly the main innovation was in China, not the U.S., which added to the communication issue. Sometimes odd politics led to surprising promotions or credit being given to the wrong people.

Advice to Senior Management

Go back to having a communicative development process with requirements and functional specs created and reviewed by other folks in the company -- both to help them get their jobs done and to provide valuable feedback to the development process.

Pros

The investment that Actuate has made in their new open source offerings is a daring move, and one that might get them the market share they need as a second tier business intelligence software provider. This technology, along with the community of open source developers that back it, have led to some very exciting technological advances that make the products very exciting to work with. Coupling these innovative products with their battle tested server offerings provides a fairly compelling story that mixes the innovation associated with open source with the stability provided by a seasoned and time tested delivery platform.

Cons

Actuate has changed its strategy numerous times, and I think this has led to confusion throughout the organization. At times, they have focused almost exclusively on marketing several different productized "reporting applications" that primarily targeted the financial sector, which makes up the majority of Actuate's install base of customers. As that sector has suffered, so has Actuate. They have also attempted to integrate several acquisitions with varying levels of success. The Performancesoft acquisition has not been well integrated, as both the technology and the skill set needed to market and sell it are very different from Actuate's traditional core competencies.

Advice to Senior Management

To avoid becoming an also-ran with an ever-shrinking customer base, Actuate needs to focus on their open source offerings and figure out a better way to monetize the market share they have gained.