ACTUATE CORPORATION ANNOUNCES JAVA STRATEGY; SETS SIGHTS ON EMERGING MARKET FOR JAVA-BASED E-BUSINESS PLATFORMS.

Java technologies have gained broad industry acceptance, the result of which is an emerging and high-growth market for Java tools used in building e-Business applications. Actuate plans to take several steps in the near term to provide information delivery solutions that are well integrated with the Java platform to further fuel company growth.

Actuate is capitalizing on its acquisition of Java tools company, EnterpriseSoft, made earlier this year. The acquisition of EnterpriseSoft was the first step in Actuate's strategy to support customers and packaged application software vendors developing e-Business environments based on the Java platform. A critical component of the e-Business platform, Information Delivery is defined as the practice of extracting content from multiple data sources and publishing this high-value business information on the Internet for use by customers, partners and employees. Information Delivery is essential to any company that wants to increase revenue, reduce costs and improve customer service.

According to IDC, the market for application server software platforms was at about $1 billion worldwide in 1999. It is estimated to be almost $1.8 billion in 2000, and to grow to over $11 billion by the year 2004. This is testimony to the importance of these products, but what is perhaps as interesting, according to IDC, is that over the past year, virtually every application server vendor has worked to ensure that their products support Java. And more specifically, that these products support the J2EE specification. IDC believes this is strong evidence that the role that Java will play in future IT systems will be significant and extremely important.

Further, IDC has developed a model that demonstrates the growth in Java usage as measured by developer seats. In 1999, in IDC's estimates, there were about 1.1 million Java developer seats worldwide. While this number is significantly less than the number for C and C++ (3.2 million) and Visual Basic (6.2 million), it will grow at an average annual rate of about 40 percent, versus about 9.5 percent for C/C++ and about two percent for Visual Basic. For the Web which represents an environment where platform independence is critical, and where middle-tier application servers are employed -- Java will be seen as a virtual standard development and deployment platform.