I really did not want to use this forum to compare specific pricing models between vendors. I was simply trying to emphasize that when comparing two solutions, the end-user should ensure that they are comparing "apples with apples". If a user determines that they will want indemnification and support for their development they should be comparing Crystal Reports with the solution vendors which provide these services for Open Source Software. In this case, I used Actuate's BIRT offering as an example. Although the reporting engine is essentially the same, Actuate does provide additional services on top of what is offered with the core Eclipse platform. All I wanted to point out is that these services come at a cost, essentially making Actuate's offering a commercial product.
As for your comment about the comparison of our $500/seat offering with your $995/server not being accurate, I believe this is due to our different licensing models. We currently do not separate the design-time(Report Designing) and runtime(Deployment) in our licensing. This means that users who purchase Crystal Reports Developer will receive the following:
A full-blown Report Designer
Deployment licensing
Indemnification
2 free support incidents
Access to our extensive knowledge base and forums
Anyways, to re-iterate, it was not my intention to get into the details of each vendor's pricing model. Instead I wanted to ensure that users understand that there are different flavors of OSS out there...free and not free. When comparing a commercial software, such as Crystal Reports, to an OSS solution just be sure to compare it to the version of the software you intend to use. In many cases, the "commercial" solution will come out cheaper than that of the "commercially-supported" OSS.
apologies for the formatting...apparently the copy over never kept the formatting (although preview worked for some reason). Here is the original again with proper formatting...if this turns out messed up as well then I will not make another attempt.:)
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
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I really did not want to use this forum to compare specific pricing models between vendors. I was simply trying to emphasize that when comparing two solutions, the end-user should ensure that they are comparing "apples with apples". If a user determines that they will want indemnification and support for their development they should be comparing Crystal Reports with the solution vendors which provide these services for Open Source Software. In this case, I used Actuate's BIRT offering as an example. Although the reporting engine is essentially the same, Actuate does provide additional services on top of what is offered with the core Eclipse platform. All I wanted to point out is that these services come at a cost, essentially making Actuate's offering a commercial product.
As for your comment about the comparison of our $500/seat offering with your $995/server not being accurate, I believe this is due to our different licensing models. We currently do not separate the design-time(Report Designing) and runtime(Deployment) in our licensing. This means that users who purchase Crystal Reports Developer will receive the following:
Anyways, to re-iterate, it was not my intention to get into the details of each vendor's pricing model. Instead I wanted to ensure that users understand that there are different flavors of OSS out there...free and not free. When comparing a commercial software, such as Crystal Reports, to an OSS solution just be sure to compare it to the version of the software you intend to use. In many cases, the "commercial" solution will come out cheaper than that of the "commercially-supported" OSS.
Regards,Sean
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:
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