Actuate Corp. a provider in business intelligence, performance management and reporting applications and an IBM Business Partner, recently announced that its commercial BIRT-based offerings can now extend IBM Rational Portfolio Manager to improve SOA governance.

Actuate applauds the new levels of flexibility and insight for project planners in IBM Rational Portfolio Manager V7.1, through the addition of standard open source Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) -based reports and an open, extensible data warehouse for Actuate and IBM Rational customers. BIRT is the Eclipse Foundation open source project initiated by Actuate, for web-based reporting. IBM is a contributing member to the Eclipse BIRT project.

With Actuate’s BIRT-based commercial products that extend the BIRT-based reports in IBM Rational Portfolio Manager, end users from senior executives to IT staff can benefit from enhanced flexible reporting and analysis. The functionality will provide greater visibility into the performance of their IT portfolio to proactively manage their application lifecycle to ensure optimal performance.

 “The combination of Actuate’s Business Intelligence solutions with IBM Rational Portfolio Manager allow companies to exploit open source collaboration and extend SOA governance capabilities,” said Scott Hebner, Vice President, Marketing and Strategy for IBM Rational Software. “This integration gives companies greater visibility for business decisions about the related IT portfolio.”