Business Objects have announced that they are joining the Eclipse Foundation and are going to Open Source some of their tools. This is a very timely move for them as there appears to be a lot of energy building behind their Open Source competitors which must surely be hurting sales of Crystal at the low-end.

Whilst none of the Open Source tools have the breadth and depth of Crystal’s capabilities, in many cases they are “good enough”. Whilst we have been happily using Crystal and Crystal Enterprise/Server for quite a while now, the Open Source alternatives are becoming more and more attractive. It looks like the BO move is particularly targetting BIRT which is integrated into Eclipse, has a solid business model behind it and for which paid support (a must for many large enterprises) is available.

We have built our own capabilities with some of the leading products such as JasperReports (and related tools like OpenReports and iReport) and BIRT. Our developement services can now provide any of the above as part of an engagement.

The importance of an enterprise reporting system cannot be understated. To many people, reports mean bureaucratic paperwork for middle-management. But an accurate Business Intelligence System (an overused but accurate term) can mean the difference between running your infrastructure at 40% utilisation or 80%. It can allow you to plan asset purchases in advance based on usage trends rather than always having to be done during a fire-fight. In fact, a well-targetted BI System with both historical and up-to-date data will reduce the number of those fire-fights because you always know where you are and where you are going.

If you think you may have an Reporting/BI requirement and wish to discuss it further then don’t hesitate to contact us. Even the smallest SME can benefit from having a better insight into the core metrics of their business operations and planning.

[tags] Business Objects, Crystal Reports, JasperReports, iReport, OpenReports, BIRT, Eclipse, BI, Reporting, Business Intelligence, Infrastructure, Data Center, Open Source[/tags]