Business Objects to Join Eclipse Foundation

daria42 writes "Business intelligence specialist Business Objects is the latest software maker to join the Eclipse Foundation, and says it will move several products onto the open source platform -- but it's not yet saying which. 'We won't fight it, we'll embrace it,' said one of the company's executives in Sydney last week, talking about the open source software model. 'One of the reasons we've chosen to go with the Eclipse platform, rather than any of the other open source types,' she said, 'is that [Eclipse] actually has a model where vendors can sell value-added products into it, but still provide the service components.'"

Comments

I'm surprised that it took so long

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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.