Why BIRT

In the six years since Actuate founded the BIRT open source project a lot has happened. BIRT is still co-led by Actuate, IBM and Innovent Solutions, and has been adopted by more than 750,000 developers worldwide to become the de facto open source environment for presenting compelling data visualizations on the Web.

If you choose to download and work with the open source version of BIRT for developing Business Intelligence, data visualizations or reporting, you can be sure that you’re selecting a top notch, community-driven open source technology built from the ground up to be an open source project, not a mix of outdated, donated code. In addition, you become part of a growing and vibrant community of BIRT developers and users. The ecosystem supporting BIRT is rich and varied, and is supported by BIRT Exchange, the most active online BIRT community.

Companies that have embedded BIRT in their solutions include Wipro, IBM, Cisco, RedHat/JBoss and Sybase. BIRT partner companies have contributed more than 40% of the applications on the BIRT Exchange Marketplace, an open software showcase that is making significant strides in BIRT adoption and contributions. The Marketplace is a destination where any organization or developer that has embraced BIRT can promote, share or sell BIRT-related applications, solutions and components.

For those still concerned with the stability and quality of open source code, BIRT must meet the exacting standards of the Eclipse Foundation. Make no mistake, BIRT is world-class software – demonstrated by its wide and growing adoption by top companies and organizations worldwide. It is based on open standards and is principally coded by Actuate, a highly respected company that knows data visualization extremely well.

So, when you download BIRT, you’re getting the best of BI and the best of open source. When you’re ready to venture beyond the open source version of BIRT and look toward scaling your project, Actuate provides value-added offerings to ensure BIRT meets any needs you have for rich, interactive content within your applications.

We’re not shy about admitting that BIRT has been good for us and that we have generated significant revenue from our BIRT-based offerings. During the three years that commercial offerings based on BIRT have been available, we’ve generated more than $45 million in BIRT-based business, making Actuate the leading open source BI vendor. In addition to the developers that have adopted BIRT, there are more than 450 paying Actuate BIRT customers which include some of the world’s most recognized brand names: HSBC Bank and Fujitsu.

Whether you stick to the open source version, or come and talk to Actuate about our value added offerings for BIRT, we think you have nothing to lose, and everything to gain by taking a closer look.