Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ: BIRT), The BIRT Company™ – delivering more insights to more people than all BI companies combined, announced today the results of their jointly sponsored Faculty Development Program (FDP) on data warehousing and business intelligence (BI). With co-sponsors COMPEGENCE and Infosys E&R, the unique training program has resulted in increased understanding and enthusiasm from students who are the BI professionals of the future. The program is taking traditional business intelligence education to the next level with workshops for professors and scholars, bringing business intelligence to life through hands-on learning and practice.

Reporting on the differences made by the FDP program, Professor Sejal Nimbhalkar, of T John Institute of Technology, Bangalore, has initiated a pilot project in teaching BI with Actuate, and students are enthusiastic and satisfied with the tool. Professor Shrikanth Athnikar, KLE DR. M.S., of Sheshagiri College of Engineering and Technology, Belgaum, reports that the College has trained ten of its selected students, and they are planning to incorporate Actuate for reporting projects. And one of the Colleges at BMS College of Engineering has sent a proposal to the University to include this subject as covered in the workshop as part of Curriculum from the next academic session.

“With the FDP hands-on sessions, we gained confidence and inspiration to take business intelligence learnings to our students,” said Sunitha Watts, Faculty of CITI College, Bangalore. “Compared to other tools we have seen, Actuate is simpler and more user-friendly.”

Addressing the motivation behind sponsoring the program, Nobby Akiha, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Actuate, said, “The ability to inspire the world’s future business intelligence leaders to garner the appropriate skills and capabilities to manage business analytics starts with enhancing the training they receive at university. The key is to educate students and help them understand that, in today’s global workplace, business users as well as data engineers have much higher expectations of how easily and how fast business analytics technology can deliver insights to drive business improvement.”

The Faculty Development Program enables the provision of interactive training to the faculty through relevant case studies, videos, and brainstorm sessions. Through the faculty in attendance, FDP aims to educate and transfer knowledge to university students on the importance of strategic data management as well as tactical usage of business intelligence. An integral part of the program involves teaching faculty members how to translate FDP learnings into semester-long, in-classroom sessions – including strategic faculty follow-up plans.

Actuate – The BIRT Company™

Actuate founded and co-leads the BIRT open source project, which is used by over 1.5 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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