Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ: BIRT), The BIRT Company and the leader in open source business intelligence (BI) - today announced that golf travel specialist Golfbreaks.com has implemented Quiterian’s visual analytics product to deepen its understanding of both its clients and suppliers. Golfbreaks.com – Europe’s largest golf travel company - will use the tool across its entire portfolio, including sister brands Teeofftimes.co.uk and Bookaspa.com. The company selected Quiterian Analytics for its powerful visualization, and because it shifts the emphasis away from the IT department responding to data requests – to business users driving their own queries. Quiterian was recently acquired by Actuate Corporation, and Quiterian Analytics will be rebranded as BIRT Analytics (see announcement on October 22nd: Actuate Acquires Quiterian S.L. to Deliver Big Data Analytics and Visual Data Mining to Business Users).

Goflbreaks.com has experienced 13 years of rapid and sustained growth since its inception in 1998, with the number of bookings increasing more than tenfold in six years, going from less than 20,000 a year to 200,000. The move to Quiterian comes as part of on-going investment in business intelligence, analytics and CRM, which has left senior management keen to be able to better segment, profile, and predict customer behavior. VPT, a UK-based Quiterian reseller partner, has been involved with various aspects of Golfbreaks.com’s BI and analytics-related projects and is seen as a trusted partner in both strategic consultancy and implementation.

Golf tourism is worth more than $17 billion worldwide across a broad demographic, and proactive exploration of marketing and operational data will certainly give Golfbreaks.com a competitive advantage: “This product meets a need that we see evolving,” Steve Hemsworth, Managing Director at Golfbreaks.com, commented. “We already have good BI, but we want to be able to intuitively drive analysis of client behavior and product performance. The insights Quiterian Analytics can give us into who is likely to do what, when and where, will enable a massive improvement in both our product development and the quality of advice we can give our clients. It will also increase the effectiveness of our decision making.”

VPT helped Golfbreaks.com throughout the whole process, from presenting Quiterian as a solution to an identified need, to technical and organizational implementation and customized training.

“Our confidence in VPT was a key factor in our buying decision,” continued Hemsworth. “Their engagement with our needs and their best-practice advocacy has been critical in the successful deployment. With so much evolution in our BI and analytics technology and practice going on across the organization we needed a safe pair of hands, and that’s what VPT offers.”

Specific uses to which Golfbreaks.com will be putting the Quiterian tool will include identifying clients who would enjoy products outside their usual buying habits, improving the effectiveness of their Breakpoints loyalty scheme as a marketing tool, and looking at patterns around venue use.

“The Quiterian product is a true business-user-driven tool,” says Daniel Fedak, Managing Director at VPT. “Ad-hoc queries can be made through an intuitive and highly visual interface without the need to go through IT or analytics specialists. Users ‘discover’ ever-deepening insights through an exploratory process that is very natural.”

Fedak added, “We enjoy working with Golfbreaks.com; it is an organization that stays ahead of the game by embracing innovation and taking a practical approach to business problems. We are also very pleased with the flexible and rapid delivery we have experienced with Quiterian. In less than 10 weeks at Golfbreaks.com, Quiterian Analytics took the step up from observing performance to exploring patterns and bringing a new level of insight to a wide variety of businesses.”

About Golfbreaks.com

Golfbreaks.com was formed in 1998 by Andrew Stanley, Chief Executive, and is Europe’s largest golf travel company, organizing golf breaks and holidays for hundreds of thousands of golfers a year in the UK, Europe and worldwide. With more than 13 years’ experience and an expert team that is passionate about golf and travel, we are known for delivering outstanding service, with the reassurance and security of booking with an ABTA and ATOL bonded travel company. Golfbreaks.com has partnership deals with the PGA, The Daily Telegraph and Bauer Media, publishers of Golf World and Todays Golfer magazines, and is also the only golf travel company to reward customers for their loyalty through the Breakpoints customer rewards program, which earns money off all future bookings made with Golfbreaks.com and its sister companies, Teeofftimes.co.uk and BookaSpa.com.

About VPT

VPT is a boutique Business Intelligence and Analytics consultancy with a passion for making data meaningful. This is reflected in their 10 years of consulting and delivery experience with over 100 successful implementations. VPT’s unique combination of strategic excellence, deep technical know-how and project leadership means that their executive-level guidance is well grounded and their involvement exceeds expectations.

About Quiterian

Actuate acquired Quiterian in October 2012. Quiterian fits very well into Actuate’s core business and strengthens its unique ability to help more end users identify and operationalize insights derived from any data source. Quiterian Analytics will be integrated into Actuate’s flagship product, ActuateOne, and will be known as BIRT Analytics.

Quiterian Analytics software was featured in Gartner’s 2012 report “Magic Quadrant for BI platforms” for “providing data discovery tools with predictive analytics, and allowing business analysts to conduct Visual Data Mining without relying on the specialized skills of a data scientist”.

Among its clients are leading companies in their sectors (Station Casinos, El Corte Inglés, BBVA, La Caixa, Telefónica, Vodafone, Orange, Volkswagen, Bayer) and some of the most relevant public services institutions including public health, transportation, homeland security and government. For more, please see: http://www.actuate.com/quiterian.

Actuate – The BIRT Company^™

Actuate founded and co-leads the BIRT open source project, which is used by 2 million developers around the globe and serves as the foundation of the ActuateOne^® 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 and customer communications 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, Actuate has over 5,000 customers globally in a diverse range of business areas including financial services, technology and the public sector. 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.

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