Crystal galvanises position as reporting powerhouse
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Crystal Decisions is eyeing strong revenue growth from extending its front-office reporting technology out to end users across large networks.
Crystal Decisions is coming through its identity crisis. The company – best known for its widely-deployed report generator Crystal Reports – was spun off as an independent entity in November 2000 by US storage product giant Seagate Technology – its foster parent for six years. Shortly afterwards, the company dropped the name Seagate Software, reverting to its original Crystal identity, and recentred executive control back in its hometown of Vancouver.
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Since then, the company has aggressively ramping up its move beyond the client-based reporting segment and into the mainstream of enterprise business intelligence software. Central to those efforts was the launch of Crystal Enterprise in March 2001. That provided a server-centric platform for data analysis, building reports of all levels of sophistication, and the delivery of these over the web to hundreds or even thousands of relevant users – either internal or external to the organisation. Alongside that the company also offers Crystal Analysis, an interrogation tool for multi-dimensional data based on the Holos online analytical processing (OLAP) product set the company acquired in 1997.
Crystal Enterprise puts the company in head-to-head competition with other specialists in enterprise reporting, most notably Actuate and ProClarity, as well as broader BI software players – Business Objects, Brio, Cognos, Information Builders and others – with strong reporting technologies.
Unlike many of these rivals, Crystal has a distinct Windows focus – and it has a massive install base (of five million users) into which it can sell Enterprise. Since 1994, a custom version of Crystal Reports has shipped for free with Microsoft's Visual Basic/Visual Studio development's toolkit.
Certainly the restructuring of the company is showing positive results. During the three months to the end of March, revenues rose 28% to $56.2 million – a pace well above its direct rivals and one which, if sustainable, will put it within reach of BI market leaders Cognos and Business Objects within the next two years.
