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Business Objects to Join Eclipse Foundation

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the getting-to-be-a-big-bandwagon dept.

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.'"

2 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. I'm surprised that it took so long by brokeninside · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Eclipse Is The Most Import Software Product by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I use to think Firefox was the big one, the computing world mover.

    Firefox is kid stuff compared to the impact Eclipse is starting to have. My entire company's development has been unified under Eclipse. Developers can seamlessly move from platform to platform. Writing extensions is trivial and only requires a moderate amount of Java experience, which most already have or can have quickly.

    Eclipse has suddenly made Linux a first class development platform. Eclipse has turned a huge number of Windows engineers into Linux engineers who write for Linux first and run Linux at home. I can't describe the feeling of freedom and cleanliness that has brought to our company.

    Thank god I will never have to touch that piece of garbage Visual Studio again.