General description

The makers of Crystal Reports, Crystal Decisions, is one of the world's leading information management software companies with more than 14 million licenses shipped. Since 1984, Crystal Decisions has powered winning organizations with one of the fastest ways for employees, partners and customers to access the information they need to make the best decisions and ultimately reduce costs and increase productivity. The Crystal brand is among the most trusted names in enterprise reporting and more than 345 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) have standardized on Crystal Decisions' solutions. Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., Crystal Decisions has more than 25 offices worldwide and can be found on the Internet at www.crystaldecisions.com

Industry description

Business intelligence (BI) provides timely and accurate information to better understand your business and to make more informed, real-time business decisions. BI software can access data from disparate data sources and incompatible applications across an organization and turn the data into valuable business information in the form of reports: useful tables, charts and maps that graphically present the information. Full utilization of BI solutions can optimize business processes and resources, improve proactive decision making and maximize profits/minimize costs.

For the last thirty years, companies have invested billions of dollars in operating systems, databases, and application software to help run their businesses, only to realize it is difficult to find an actual ROI on these technological investments. The explosion of information over the last decade has given corporations an unprecedented opportunity to understand business performance, plan future strategy and more efficiently manage business activity through any economic climate. Yet, most companies are unable to harness this information effectively to guide decision-making at all levels in the organization.

Product description

Crystal Reports is a high productivity reporting technology for rapidly transforming almost any data into interactive content. Its flexible designer delivers complete control over data access and presentation. More than 35 data drivers are included for access to virtually any XML, OLAP, enterprise or relational data source. Powerful productivity tools maximize efficiency by enabling the sharing of reporting components and skills across projects. Flexible SDKs and rich developer controls provide tight content integration into .NET, Java, and COM applications for end user interaction and modification at runtime. New Report Parts and support for Microsoft Smart Tags in Office XP enable report access, navigation and interaction via portals, Microsoft Office documents, and wireless devices.

Crystal Analysis Professional delivers guided workflows enabling employees, customers and suppliers to easily gain insight into their business data and make intelligent decisions to impact corporate performance. Users can recognize trends, comparisons and significant points of interest modeled on the business process to determine reasons for variations in predicted performance. Through a point-and-click design environment and rich visualization techniques, power users can build and modify their reports without having to rely on IT. Integrated with the Web, this solution employs a cost-effective environment for scalable analysis through a zero (DHTML) or rich-client interface.

Crystal Enterprise is a platform for reporting, analysis and information delivery that helps companies make better use of corporate data to understand and improve business performance. Crystal Enterprise is designed to integrate seamlessly with your existing data, web and application investments. It delivers the reliability, scalability and flexibility you should expect from a system that is a core piece of your IT infrastructure. The result is a powerful platform that helps you increase productivity while lowering cost of ownership for your business intelligence system.

At the very core of the Crystal Enterprise platform is a robust cross-platform, multi-server infrastructure for organizing, managing and delivering information across an organization. Crystal Enterprise provides a central repository for organizing content, ensuring that users can readily access the latest information, as well as historical snapshots. A hierarchical security system allows you to enforce consistent policies around information viewing and interaction. Specialized services handle either on-demand data access/report generation or time- and event-based scheduling of reports. Built-in distribution capabilities can automatically alert users of critical information via e-mail or portals, or output reports in a variety of formats to specific destinations (e.g. e-mail, FTP sites, network printers).

Crystal Enterprise delivers a comprehensive feature set for viewing, navigating and interacting with formatted reports and a full spectrum of analytic capabilities, from simple report modification to detailed report design/formatting to in-depth analysis, allowing power users and end user to easily share their business insights. Crystal Enterprise integrates Crystal Reports and Crystal Analysis, both award-winning report creation tools to enable rapid creation of interactive content from virtually any data source.