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I work for Business Objects. In fact, I am the Product Manager for our new Crystal Reports for Eclipse offering. I attend a number of conferences with my job and often get asked this very question..."Why should I use your product over an Open Source Solution?" Open Source is free after all...isn't it? Well, in my mind it depends on what you mean by free. If you have the resources internally to committ your Developer resources to modify an open source project should it require it, then you may perceive this as being free. Based on my experience with Developer salaries it would not take long for a company to justify a $500 (or $700 as you quote) to by a fully supported and indemnified reporting solution. If your company's core competence is not in reporting then you really need to evaluate how much effort you want to put into modifying a reporting solution to fit your needs.

On top of this, a number of companies have a business model based purely on supporting and indemnifying open source software. Let's take BIRT for example, if you want to deliver it in a solution that requires indemnification or if you require any formal support at all, you can expect to pay Actuate from $995 (plus $95 for cost of Designer) to $6995 http://www.actuate.com/products/techzone/birtrepor ting/birt_pricing/networkbasic.asp/ [actuate.com]. Business Objects includes indemnification and support in all of their products, which puts us at about half the cost of Actuate's lowest offering.

On top of this, users need to answer these questions when choosing their reporting solution:

• Do I need to support .NET and Java applications?
• Will I potentially need to expand my solution?
• Do I need support and indemnification?
• Can I dedicate Developer time and effort to fixing and maintaining your modified oss code?

So based on how you answer these questions an organization should be able to determine what is the best solution for them. Currently, we are the only reporting solution natively supported in both .NET and Java, which plays a large part in why we are the #1 reporting solution used by Developers.

If there may be a possibility that your solution may grow to require more "enterprise-level" features (e.g. fault-tolerance, scheduling, load-balancing and security) then you need to consider how well your current solution will grow. Ofcourse Pentaho claims to support BIRT, however Pentaho is largely unproven right now and still has a business model around providing support for the servers which starts at $1000.

Don't get me wrong. I love open source, I personally use a number of open source solutions, and of course Crystal Reports for Eclipse (http://www.businessobjects.com/eclipse/ [businessobjects.com]) is built on the Eclipse Platform. I am just trying to convey that Developers really have to assess their current needs and situations before choosing any reporting solution (open source or not). The misconception that open source solutions are free often ends up costing an organization a lot more in the long run because they never took the time to do an initial assessment of what they actually expect from the product. A lot of companies are making a lot of money off of providing support and solutions for open source software. There is a reason for this, and I think it's very important to include these "potential" costs whenever choosing a solution.

As for reporting technologies specifically, Crystal Reports has been providing solutions for Developers for over 13 years. We have a proven reporting solution rich with

I posted this earlier unintentionally under anonymous. It was more that I was not paying as close attention as I should have been than an act of cowardice as the name suggests. Anyways, I logged in this time and decided to post it top level: I work for Business Objects. In fact, I am the Product Manager for our new Crystal Reports for Eclipse offering. I attend a number of conferences with my job and often get asked this very question..."Why should I use your product over an Open Source Solution?" Open Source is free after all...isn't it? Well, in my mind it depends on what you mean by free. If you have the resources internally to committ your Developer resources to modify an open source project should it require it, then you may perceive this as being free. Based on my experience with Developer salaries it would not take long for a company to justify a $500 (or $700 as you quote) to by a fully supported and indemnified reporting solution. If your company's core competence is not in reporting then you really need to evaluate how much effort you want to put into modifying a reporting solution to fit your needs. On top of this, a number of companies have a business model based purely on supporting and indemnifying open source software. Let's take BIRT for example, if you want to deliver it in a solution that requires indemnification or if you require any formal support at all, you can expect to pay Actuate from $995 (plus $95 for cost of Designer) to $6995 http://www.actuate.com/products/techzone/birtrepor ting/birt_pricing/networkbasic.asp/ [actuate.com]. Business Objects includes indemnification and support in all of their products, which puts us at about half the cost of Actuate's lowest offering. On top of this, users need to answer these questions when choosing their reporting solution: * Do I need to support .NET and Java applications? * Will I potentially need to expand my solution? * Do I need support and indemnification? * Can I dedicate Developer time and effort to fixing and maintaining my modified oss code? So based on how you answer these questions an organization should be able to determine what is the best solution for them. Currently, we are the only reporting solution natively supported in both .NET and Java, which plays a large part in why we are the #1 reporting solution used by Developers. If there may be a possibility that your solution may grow to require more "enterprise-level" features (e.g. fault-tolerance, scheduling, load-balancing and security) then you need to consider how well your current solution will grow. Ofcourse Pentaho claims to support BIRT, however Pentaho is largely unproven right now and still has a business model around providing support for the servers which starts at $1000. Don't get me wrong. I love open source, I personally use a number of open source solutions, and of course Crystal Reports for Eclipse (http://www.businessobjects.com/eclipse/ [businessobjects.com]) is built on the Eclipse Platform. I am just trying to convey that Developers really have to assess their current needs and situations before choosing any reporting solution (open source or not). The misconception that open source solutions are free often ends up costing an organization a lot more in the long run because they never took the time to do an initial assessment of what they actually expect from the product. A lot of companies are making a lot of money off of providing support and solutions for open source software. There is a reason for this, and I think it's very important to include these "potential" costs whenever choosing a solution. As for reporting technologies specifically, Crystal Reports has been providing solutions for Developers for over 13 years. We have a proven reporting solution rich with features that I can confidently say no open source solution matches up with. Sure, there will be features t

• Do I need to support .NET and Java applications?
• Will I potentially need to expand my solution?
• Do I need support and indemnification?
• Can I dedicate Developer time and effort to fixing and maintaining your modified oss code?

So based on how you answer these questions an organization should be able to determine what is the best solution for them. Currently, we are the only reporting solution natively supported in both .NET and Java, which plays a large part in why we are the #1 reporting solution used by Developers.

If there may be a possibility that your solution may grow to require more "enterprise-level" features (e.g. fault-tolerance, scheduling, load-balancing and security) then you need to consider how well your current solution will grow. Ofcourse Pentaho claims to support BIRT, however Pentaho is largely unproven right now and still has a business model around providing support for the servers which starts at $1000.

Don't get me wrong. I love open source, I personally use a number of open source solutions, and of course Crystal Reports for Eclipse (http://www.businessobjects.com/eclipse/) is built on the Eclipse Platform. I am just trying to convey that Developers really have to assess their current needs and situations before choosing any reporting solution (open source or not). The misconception that open source solutions are free often ends up costing an organization a lot more in the long run because they never took the time to do an initial assessment of what they actually expect from the product. A lot of companies are making a lot of money off of providing support and solutions for open source software. There is a reason for this, and I think it's very important to include these "potential" costs whenever choosing a solution.

As for reporting technologies specifically, Crystal Reports has been providing solutions for Developers for over 13 years. We have a proven reporting solution rich with features that I can confidently say no open source solution matches up with. Sure, there will be features that both Crystal and an open source reporting solution will have in common, but if you look at a complete feature matrix, as well as the customer references attesting t

Ultimately, the suitability of the software depends on your requirements, doesn't it? Do you require source? Do you require a lower cost solution? Do you require support? These are common reasons to evaluate open software replacements for commercial offerings. Chances are you won't find an open source solution that will match the features, functions and support of the commercial offerings available. This, I suspect, will change in time with projects like BIRT http://www.actuate.com/birt and companies like MARVELit http://www.marvelit.com/ and Pentaho http://www.pentaho.com/ adding functions, features and support.
Highlight your reporting requirements and I suspect the /.ers can give you a better answer than calling Cognos. :)

The Eclipse project has been working on business reporting for quite some time. They presently have a rudimentary BIRT module (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) that, for its limited breadth and depth, is actually fairly impressive. One of Business Objects' competitors, Actuate, already has a product built on top of Eclipse.

Hopefully, this shift will pan out as a move to better integration of Crystal Reports with web services without having to shell out for Crystal Enterprise. Up through the present, most of Crystal's eggs have been placed in the COM basket so that reporting is best automated through Windows programming. This is great in that you can automatically connect to a database, run a report, export the output and email the export in a few dozen lines of VBScript. But if Business Objects is moving to web services, it will offer a great deal more flexibility as automation will no longer be restricted to Windows.

Actuate e.Reporting Suite?

It's not open source, and many of the development tools are exclusive to a Windows environment; but the application server can be hosted on a *nix box and talk to Oracle and other SQL databases. It's reasonably fast, allows for ad hoc and batch reporting, and can produce output in HTML, DHTML (IE-specific or standards-compliant), Excel, PDF, XML, and other formats.

Anyway my personal opinion is that HTML is wrong wrong wrong for this stuff. Generate TeX output and convert to postscript, or *roff, or generate postscript directly. If the target is dead trees you should use dead-tree-era technology.