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February 20, 2002

BI Web Services take a Step Forward

The newly released Microsoft Visual Studio .NET includes a special version of Crystal Reports that brings Web services for business intelligence (BI) one step closer to user adoption.

by Philip Russom

Much of the IT world sat up and took notice of the recent launch of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, because it provides an environment for developers who need to create transactional applications that involve Web services. One thing that escaped the notice of many people, however, is that Visual Studio .NET supports more than Web-based transactions. It also has a BI component in the form of a tightly integrated reporting tool.

Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET

Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET is a special edition of Crystal Reports, developed and marketed by Crystal Decisions Inc. (formerly called Seagate Software). Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET ships with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. In fact, it is the only third-party product included on the default installation of Visual Studio .NET, and it's available in the eight localized languages that Visual Studio .NET supports.

The key benefit of Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET is that it enables Web application developers to create interactive reports within Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, instead of writing a report in a separate, isolated point product, then integrating the two. Once a report is done, the developer simply invokes the 'Publish as Web Service' command to expose it as a BI Web service.

Both Crystal Reports and Visual Studio have sizable user communities, and the two communities have much in common in their reliance on Microsoft technologies, platforms, and products. The tight integration between Crystal Reports and Visual Studio .NET has the potential for helping these communities leverage their long experience with and large inventory of Crystal-created reports as they move into a .NET-oriented world of Web services. According to Crystal Decisions documentation, you can use older Crystal Reports .RPT files, if you have them. Hence, to me, the partnership between Microsoft and Crystal Decisions seems natural, practical, and potentially synergistic.

Even so, note that the capabilities of Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET are not the same as those of Crystal Reports 8.5 Developer edition. For example, the Visual Studio version does not support non-Microsoft data sources, and it's only for reporting, not analysis. If you need access to a wide range of data sources and OLAP capabilities, you'll need Crystal Reports 8.5. Yet, you need Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET to get support for ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and BI Web services. The two editions of Crystal Reports are largely complementary in terms of function, and you should think of Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET as extending Crystal Reports 8.5 Developer edition to support BI Web services and other entities of the .NET environment.

Assessment

Microsoft is in step with BI. I think it's clear that Microsoft executives recognize the ever-growing importance of BI functions to IT and application developers, as well as the need for BI functions embedded in platforms and development tools. After all, Microsoft responded to this need long ago by embedding OLAP and data mining capabilities in SQL Server, as well as by providing analytic interfaces like OLEDB for OLAP and OLEDB for data mining. Furthermore, Microsoft and its partners have developed XML for Analysis, an API designed from the bottom up for exposing reporting, OLAP, and data mining functions as BI Web services.

By embedding a special edition of Crystal Reports in the Visual Studio .NET development and deployment environment, Microsoft recognizes that BI Web services are a useful and needed part of the Web services world. Unfortunately, I don't see other leading Web services infrastructure and tool providers — namely IBM and Sun Microsystems — making a similar commitment to BI Web services.

Crystal Decisions steps into the lead. Despite announcements from a few vendors of BI software, Crystal Decisions has stepped into the lead as the only vendor to ship a product today that enables BI Web services with high usability. Business Objects did a good job promoting its recent announcement of upcoming BI Web services support; but Business Objects is offering a mere SDK, and it won't be generally available for another quarter. MicroStrategy Inc.'s approach is to prudently support traditional Web technologies and standards (like TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, SSL, and so forth) as well as newer ones (especially XML and SOAP) so its customers can easily build any kind of service they want, including BI Web services. This approach is fully appropriate to MicroStrategy's high-market customers (who prefer to build their own solutions), but it doesn't address the ease-of-use that integrating Crystal into a high-level tool like Visual Studio offers.

Although Crystal Decisions has a momentary lead, the vendor to watch in the next few months may well be Hyperion Solutions, because its strategy for BI Web services is more comprehensive than others. Hyperion is planning support for all relevant Web-based standards (from SOAP to XML for Analysis), functions for publishing Web services in its own BI tools, support for popular development tools (including Visual Studio .NET), and packaged Web services for tying its multidimensional database to Excel and other popular applications.

I can't help but mention that most BI vendors (Brio Software Inc. and Cognos Inc. are prominent examples) have so far missed the BI Web services boat. But that's okay. Web services in general are still very new, and Web services specifically for BI are in demand today with only the bravest of early adopters. So vendors have plenty of time to gauge their customers' requirements and supply the demand appropriately. For the adventurous early adopters that need BI Web services today, however, Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET is an important step forward.

Philip Russom, Ph.D. [www.philiprussom.com] is an independent industry analyst and consultant based in Waltham, Mass.