Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ: BIRT), The BIRT Company™ – delivering more insights to more people than all BI companies combined – today released exclusive survey results in a report entitled, “Big Data Today: How Real is it?” The report finds what portion of Global 9000 firms (companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenues) are conducting Big Data projects; details their challenges and opportunities; and shows in which operational areas they plan to use Big Data insights to drive organizational improvements.

As a leader in Big Data, Actuate partners with other leaders to provide easy access to visualize, analyze and operationalize virtually all types of structured or unstructured data. The ActuateOne^® platform continually evolves to address the growth and management of data that delivers insights to drive business effectiveness.

The research was conducted on behalf of Actuate by King Research. 516 survey responses were received, and 32% of those who completed the survey were employed by companies with revenue of $1B or more. The resulting report focuses on the responses from those at companies with revenue of $1B or more.

“The survey shows that 26 percent of companies with $1B+ in revenue are currently working on Big Data projects, 34 percent are in the evaluating and planning phase, while 40 percent have not evaluated or have evaluated and plan not to proceed,” said Ross King, Founder, King Research. “For the 40 percent who plan not to move forward on a Big Data project, they stated their major inhibitors were ‘not enough staff with expertise’ and the ‘expected cost of Big Data initiatives’.”

The major benefits expected by all survey respondents from their Big Data initiatives include the ability to make better decisions, faster; gain competitive advantage; improve efficiency; and improve customer targeting.

Key Findings

• The most frequently mentioned technologies evaluated or planned at $1B+ companies in descending order of mention were Apache Hadoop, Cloudera Hadoop, Apache Hive, Apache HBase, EMC Greenplum HD. The most frequently mentioned technologies in use at $1B+ companies are the same five and in the same descending order.
• Most frequently mentioned Big Data applications implemented or planned at companies with $1B+ revenue are: customer experience analysis (the most frequently cited application), customer insights, fraud prevention and analysis, market targeting, behavioral analysis, customer lifecycle analysis and operations improvement.
• Of companies currently working on Big Data projects, 73 percent share their insights with more than 500 people within their organization.
• A majority of respondents work at companies with more than 500 employees in their IT organizations. Of these respondents, a significant majority work at companies with fewer than 10 people on their Big Data teams.

“No matter the stage of implementation, this survey shows the concept of Big Data is here to stay, and brings to the forefront the need for intuitive, powerful BI and analytics tools that can be used by all levels of the organization,” said Nobby Akiha, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Actuate. “As seen in the research, the real challenge is how to distill this massive amount of data into something that’s digestible and meaningful – data that can be used to make qualified decisions. That’s what ActuateOne^® does best – whether for the IT developers and data scientists, or for end-users who wants self-service and more independence from their IT group.”

Read the full report “Big Data: How Real is it?” at www.actuate.com/info/bigdataresearch.

About King Research

Ross King founded King Research in the San Francisco Bay Area in January, 1995. Mr. King previously spent many years in key sales and marketing management positions, conducting research, launching products, building distribution channels and creating sales and marketing teams at technology companies in Silicon Valley. Mr. King developed the qualitative and quantitative research capabilities used by the firm that are tailored for each client’s project needs.

About 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.

Copyright © 2012 Actuate Corporation. All rights reserved. Actuate, ActuateOne, and the Actuate logo are registered trademarks of Actuate Corporation and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and certain other countries. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between Actuate and any other company. All other brands, names or trademarks mentioned may be trademarks of their respective owners.