Open Source nipping at Business Objects Heels?
Written on November 8, 2005 by Conor O'Neill
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.
Technorati Tags: Business Objects, Crystal Reports, JasperReports, iReport, OpenReports, BIRT, Eclipse, BI, Reporting, Business Intelligence, Infrastructure, Data Center, Open Source
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You are mistaken in stating that Business Objects are open sourcing their tools. They are joining Eclipse as an add-in provider. This only means that they are building commercial products that integrated with Eclipse. This move in my opinion just validates BIRT. It means nothing for those folks hooked on BO and who might be expecting open source from BO. It does not mean an open framework in the style of Eclipse. It means still the proprietary report format for Crystal etc. So, take the announcement from BO with a grain of salt. They are trying to cash in on the buzz around open source. The very fact that you mistook their announcement as them releasing open source tools is an indication of this.
Good luck!
Re-reading the article, they state that they are “getting behind” Open Source. So both the article author and I took that to mean that they are releasing some parts of their product suite as Open Source. But you are right, at no point do they actually state that.
The releasing of the format for Crystal RPTs would be of major benefit to BO’s customers. We have lost track of the number of reports that have got corrupted internally by Crystal and the customer “support” response is “re-create it from scratch”.
A n eco-system of supporting tools could be created by interested users if they knew what the file format was. Whilst it might cause some Open Source Tools to add RPT compatibility and compete with Crystal, most customers would stay with what they know. So it becomes a win-win. But it is unlikely we’ll ever see this happen.