I'd like to throw out another company for consideration. I don't have the time right now to do an in-depth analysis myself but I can provide a few pointers. The company is Actuate (ACTU). Their product is enterprise reporting software, a category they essentially invented as a significant tier above the likes of Crystal Reports.
I don't know if there is any piece of what they do that really qualifies a proprietary, but technically they are *way* ahead of all other open system reporting solutions. Simply put, as a developer, I have never had much interest in third party report writers, except for the really simple ones to give to end-users, because just about the time the report got really interesting, i.e., something that would be a key focal point of the product, they third party tool would run out of gas and one would have to fall back into writing code. Not so with Actuate who can not only do anything you want, but will do a lot more than one would be likely to ever attempt when coding.
So, technically I have been a big Actuate fan for a while, but that doesn't necessarily translate into a big growth stock opportunity. The stock has grown quite a bit over the last year and they are up to $16M in revenue the last quarter, a 127% gain, so something is happening. What I am unsure of is whether there is a real potential tornado.
The one reason that I think there might be is that the most recent version of the product is very strong on Internet presentation, even including presentation of reports which did not originate in Actuate. This includes a lot of functionality which one would want in Internet reporting such as hyperlinks, security, graphics, navigation, advanced searching, DHTML formatting, etc., but, more than this really since the features are strong enough to do catalogs and other special functions one wouldn't normally think of as "reporting". E.g., they demo a store locator where one types in a zip code to get a map and list of the stores in that area. The zip code is really just a page number in a customized navigation bar, but it works just super, better probably than some fancier solution.
Were it not for the Internet component I would look for "mere" strong growth from the company, but if they succeeded in becoming a key tool in Internet reporting and special functionality like this, then the growth could be much more explosive. They have a huge technical lead on any competition -- the kind of edge one sees in software where there is no real reason why other companies couldn't do the same thing, but they lack the visionary leadership and key understanding of how to approach the problem and thus are effectively blocked. |
