Sybase Analytics

Hello Sybase community!

My name is Ray Gans. I am the Community Manager for the BIRT community, and employed by Actuate Corporation – the primary developer of BIRT. My role is to support the BIRT developer and IT professional community by acting as their liaison to Actuate and ensuring the community’s voice is heard.

Ray Gans, Community Manager for the BIRT Exchange

Background on BIRT
Actuate, along with the Eclipse Foundation, founded BIRT in 2004 as the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools project which today is one of the top and most successful projects in the Eclipse world. Actuate continues to staff the majority of BIRT’s open source contributors and thought leaders as the technology continues to evolve. BIRT has been downloaded well over 6.5 million times (through 2008) and we estimate that 500,000 developers have used BIRT over the last 5 years.

Actuate is very pleased that Sybase chose to include BIRT in their Sybase Workspace for Data Analytics as the reporting plug-in for Sybase IQ analytics server! These two great technology products should complement each other very well and I expect to see some great innovative data visualizations from developers, as well as from the sales and professional services teams who use these products. We have formed a partnership with Sybase and launched a series of initiatives including listing their product for purchase on our BIRT Exchange Marketplace (more details below), as well as exposing each other’s community of users to share and tap into their knowledge and information.

BIRT Exchange
In 2007 Actuate launched BIRT Exchange as a community site to address the needs of BIRT users, i.e., software developers and IT professionals, who utilize BIRT in their work as Web 2.0 application developers, report writers, ISVs, consultants and system integrators. Since its inception, BIRT Exchange has attracted over 25,000 registered members and is now the largest on-line BIRT community. Actuate and BIRT Exchange offer software products that leverage and enhance open source BIRT through its data visualization designers, viewers and deployment tools available as free-trial downloads from the site, as well as services and support offerings for BIRT-related and other technologies.

The BIRT Exchange community site hosts a community blog, newsletter, active BIRT discussion and support forums as well as DevShare, a large and growing collection of user contributed code, tutorials, webinars, whitepapers and various tips & techniques, that are freely available to all BIRT users.

A new feature on BIRT Exchange is the Open Marketplace. This site allows independent developers, ISVs and other software vendors to sell and distribute their BIRT-related applications, components, templates and other materials for free or purchase. In fact, Sybase Workspace Data Analytics is now available for purchase through our Marketplace!

Our plans are to make BIRT Exchange a one-stop-shop for all things BIRT. To that end, we are very excited about our partnership with Sybase and the Sybase IQ product. I am very impressed by the good integration of BIRT in Sybase IQ and I look forward to a great relationship between our two user communities.

Sybase IQ developers and users are more than welcome to visit and make use of the materials, forums and other assets found on BIRT Exchange. We hope to see you there so don’t hesitate to ask for assistance and/or share your experiences with other developers.

Ray Gans
Community Manager for the BIRT Community