The complete list of reporting software - Part 4

This is the final part of the complete list of reporting software. It’s been a long way down the list, but now it’s done. There are lots of characteristics that you might find important when choosing a reporting software and based on those characteristics, you must choose the right reporting software for you and for your company. I have compiled this list in order to help you with that decision. I also wrote a few things about each reporting tool so you might have a better understanding over them.
Enjoy Part 4 of the complete list of reporting software:

• OBIEE

Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus, also termed OBIEE Plus, is Oracle Corporation's set of business intelligence tools consisting of former Siebel Systems business intelligence and Hyperion Solutions business intelligence offerings.
Components:
Oracle BI server
Oracle BI Admin Tool
Oracle BI Answers
Oracle BI Marketing
Oracle BI Interactive Dashboards
Oracle BI Delivers
Oracle BI Disconnected Analytics
Oracle BI Publisher
Oracle BI Briefing Books
Oracle BI Office Plug-In
Oracle Hyperion Financial Reporting
Hyperion Interactive Reporting
Hyperion SQR Production Reporting
Hyperion Web Analysis

• Oracle Discoverer

Oracle Discoverer is a tool-set for ad-hoc querying, reporting, data analysis, and web-publishing for the Oracle Database environment. Oracle Corporation markets it as a business intelligence product. It was originally a stand-alone product, however it has become a component of the Oracle Fusion Middleware suite, and renamed Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer.
Components
The Discoverer product comprises:
Discoverer Administrator
Discoverer Catalog
Discoverer Desktop
Discoverer End-User layer
Discoverer Plus
Discoverer Portlet Provider
Discoverer Portlets
Discoverer Viewer

• Oracle Reports

Oracle Reports is a tool for developing reports against data stored in an Oracle database. Oracle Reports consists of Oracle Reports Developer (a component of the Oracle Developer Suite) and Oracle Application Server Reports Services (a component of the Oracle Application Server).
The report output can be delivered directly to a printer or saved in the following formats: HTML, RTF, PDF, XML, Microsoft Excel

• Oracle XML Publisher

Oracle XML Publisher (XMLP) is Oracle Corporation's latest reporting technology. It was originally developed to solve the reporting problems faced by Oracle Applications. When XML Publisher became part of the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition Suite it was re-branded as Oracle BI Publisher.

• SAS, as part of the BI Server suite

SAS (Statistical Analysis System) is an integrated system of software products, which enables programmers to perform:
- retrieval, data management, and data mining
- report writing and graphics
- statistical analysis
- business planning, forecasting, and decision support
- operations research and project management
- quality improvement
- applications development
- data warehousing (extract, transform, load)
- platform independent and remote computing

• SQL Server Reporting Services

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is a server-based report generation software system from Microsoft. Administered via a web interface, it can be used to prepare and deliver a variety of interactive and printed reports. SSRS competes with Crystal Reports (see above) and other business intelligence tools.

• Stimulsoft Reports

Stimulsoft Reports is an application used to design and generate reports from a wide range of data sources.
Stimulsoft Reports product line includes the following products:
- Stimulsoft Reports.Net,
- Stimulsoft Reports.Web,
- Stimulsoft Reports.Web for MVC,
- Stimulsoft Reports.Wpf,
- Stimulsoft Reports.Silverlight,
- Stimulsoft Reports Designer.Web,
- Stimulsoft Reports Designer.Silverlight,
- Stimulsoft Reports.Ultimate is a kit of products mentioned above.

• Tableau

Tableau Software offers three main products: Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server and Tableau Reader. Tableau's products have been incorporated into product suites of multiple independent software vendors, including Oracle for its Oracle Essbase Visual Explorer product

• Telerik Reporting

Telerik Reporting is a .NET reporting software for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. The product is developed and sold by the .NET solutions provider Telerik.
Features:
- Interactive reports (drill-through, hyperlinks, bookmarks)
- Embedding reports in Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows and ASP.NET applications
- WYSIWYG Design Surface
- Export to PDF, Excel, RTF, CSV, MHTML, and all graphic formats supported by GDI+ (JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, etc.)
- Convert reports from XtraReports, Crystal Reports and Active Reports.

• Windward Reports

Windward is a suite of enterprise-level reporting software, document generation software, and business intelligence software for business teams. Windward software is used for stand-alone reporting, custom reporting applications, and as the basis for OEM, VAR and other integrated data presentation needs.

• Zoho Reports (as part of the Zoho Office Suite)

An online business intelligence and reporting application in the suite. It can "create charts, pivots, summary and other wide-range of reports through a powerful drag & drop interface"

And that was the last one of the reporting softwares that I wanted to present to you. I hope that this list will be of good help to everyone who is searching for a reporting tool. Each company has certain requirements from a specific software, this is why you should consider them all before taking a decision. Choosing a reporting tool or a business tool is not an easy thing, so you should go through all the 4 articles and then make an informed decision. Good luck!

The complete list of reporting software - Part 3

In the previous articles I’ve talked about reporting software and a complete list of reporting software applications. In the first article I have talked about the open source reporting software applications. In the second article I started to share the list I have of all the commercial reporting software. This list is kinda long, so I decided to split it in three parts. This is the third part of the reporting software list, but the second part of the commercial reporting software applications available:

• FOCUS and WebFOCUS

FOCUS is a computer programming language. It is a language used to build database queries, and is regarded as a fourth-generation programming language (4GL). FOCUS resembles other data access and analysis languages such as SQL and SAS, but also includes report and chart display and presentation features. FOCUS assumes a default file structure, and automates the process of identifying files to the operating system, opening the input file, reading the next record, opening the output file, writing the next record, and closing the files. FOCUS has been designed for servers and personal computers and when they extended to world wide web, they named it WebFocus.

• Infragistics NetAdvantage Reporting

Their products enable developers to create UIs that are then become the foundation for developing applications with data visualization in line of business applications for platforms that include - Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), ASP.NET and Silverlight, as well as jQuery/HTML5 and mobile controls for the Windows Phone, iOS (iPhone and iPad) and Android.

• Izenda Self-Service Reports

Their reporting software supports SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 and MySQL and exports to all file formats.

• JReport

JReport is a java-based business intelligence application that can be deployed as an embedded reporting engine in other applications, as a stand alone system, or in any cloud environment.

• List & Label

List & Label is a reporting tool for developers to enable the design and print of reports in Microsoft Windows applications. It supports data sources and development environments such as Microsoft Visual Studio, Embarcadero RAD Studio. Reports are designed once in the interactive Designer and can then be exported to formats such as PDF, Excel, XHTML and RTF. For the custom preview format, a free viewer application is available. The Designer can be used by end-users royalty free with all paid editions of List & Label.

• LogiXML

LogiXML offers the following Web-based BI reporting and analysis products:
-Logi Info - A complete BI platform for developers to create customized, web-based dashboards, reports, and analysis applications powered by LogiXML's elemental approach that eliminates the need to write code. Logi Info comes with pre-built elements and super elements that deliver application-style end-user capabilities.
-Logi Ad Hoc - A self-service web application that enables business users to create, manage, and share dashboards, reports, and analyses.
-A bundle of Logi Info, Logi Ad Hoc, and Logi ETL, which enables developers to bring data together from diverse sources and perform data transformations.

• MicroStrategy Reporting Suite

MicroStrategy Reporting Suite is a free, commercial reporting tool for developing and delivering operational and analytical reports. Report outputs are HTML, PDF, Microsoft Excel, and text. Data can be presented in tabular grid reports, graphs and charts, and combination grid-and-graph displays.
The package is composed of server software for core analytical processing and job management, an end-user Web interface, Web-based reporting software, desktop reporting software, and a data architecting product. It is part of the unified MicroStrategy business intelligence architecture. The package includes a license for 100 users, and two free licenses for the other MicroStrategy products, including MicroStrategy Mobile, OLAP, and Distribution Services.
MicroStrategy Reporting Suite can also integrate with Microsoft Analysis Services (SSAS)

• m-Power

m-Power is software which automates enterprise web application development and modernizes legacy business applications. m-Power uses a point-and-click interface to create enterprise web applications. Applications created by m-Power run on any database or platform that supports Java.

• QlikView

Its in-memory associative search technology makes calculations in real-time, enabling business professionals to gain insight through intuitive data exploration. QlikView can be deployed on premise, in the cloud, or on a laptop or mobile device for a single user to a large global enterprise.

• Proclarity

ProClarity's products integrate tightly with Microsoft SQL Server, specifically Microsoft Analysis Services.

The complete list of reporting software - Part 2

In the previous article I’ve talked about open source reporting software and, as I promised, in this article I will be talking about Commercial reporting software. As I digged in to find all the reporting software, I realized that the list is very long, so I decided to split it in several parts. So here is the first part of the complete list of commercial reporting softwares:

• ActiveReports

Active reports is a .NET reporting tool used by the developers of WinForms and ASP.NET applications. It is a set of components and tools that facilitates the production of reports to display data in documents and web-based formats. It is written in managed C# and allows Visual Studio programmers to leverage their knowledge of C# or Visual Basic.NET when programming with ActiveReports.

• Business Objects

SAP Business Objects provides performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis and enterprise information management. Business Objects also offers consulting and education services to help customers deploy their business intelligence projects.

• Birst

Birst delivers a business analytics suite available on Cloud or on premise, behind the corporate firewall. Birst offers a single solution - Birst 5 - which includes business intelligence and analytics components such as data warehousing, ETL tools, pixel-perfect and ad hoc reports, dashboards and analytics.

• Cognos BI

This one can be provided as a framework that includes reporting software, ad-hoc reporting, analysis software, designer, analytic application, but its tools can also be purchased as singles.

• Crystal Reports

CrystalReports allows users to graphically design data connections and report layout. In the Database Expert, users can select and link tables from a wide variety of data sources, including Excel spreadsheets, Oracle databases, Business Objects Enterprise business views, and local file system information.

• NextReports

NextReports is offering their customers three distinct tools: NextReports Designer, NextReports Engine and NextReports Server. NextReports Designer is an application able to design in-grid reports using a connection to some of the most popular databases. NextReports Engine is a Java platform development library which can be used to run NextReports in another application. NextReports Server is a reports server which allows scheduling NextReports and Jasper Reports and automatically delivering them via e-mail, FTP, SSH, etc, in all sort of formats. What is great about them is that NextReports Designer and NextReports Engine are both free and NextReports server is quite cheap considering its usability.

• GL Wand

GL Wand is the collective name of reporting software for allowing Microsoft Excel to be used as the front end to either Oracle E-Business Suite or SAP as the back end ERP system.

• IBM

IBM business intelligence software includes capabilities for authoring reports, viewing reports and modifying reports and queries that meet all the users’ needs. Beside a set of tools that has been developed by IBM themselves, they have also purchased Cognos and, in addition to that - Cognos BI (See Cognos BI above).

• I-net Crystal-Clear

This is a Java-based cross-platform reporting application providing a report designer and a server component to create reports in numerous output formats like PDF, HTML, PS, RTF, XLS, TXT, CSV, SVG, XML, as well as being viewable in a Java applet or Swing component.

• InetSoft

InetSoft's software is based on open standard technology that incorporates XML, SOAP, Java, and JavaScript. While the primary design goal is easy integration with other open standards based software, access to third party proprietary software has been added in recent years.
Commercial products
-Style Intelligence is InetSoft's main business intelligence platform. It provides a visualization-driven approach to reporting, dashboards, and visual analysis.
-Style Scope is an edition of Style Intelligence that includes the patent-pending Data Block technology that is focused on interactive visualization, plus monitoring and analytic dashboards.
-Style Report Enterprise is an edition of Style Intelligence that focuses on enterprise reporting. It delivers carefully formatted information to a wide business user community.
Free applications
-Style Scope Free Edition is a small-footprint server that delivers Web-based interactive Flash dashboards and visualizations that can be shared within an organization. It provides support for multi-source data mashups and full admin and permission controls.
-Visualize Free is a visual analysis application that allows users to explore their own data visually and interactively. It requires no software installation.
-Style Chart is a charting engine and JavaScript API for Web developers to embed charts and graphs in Web pages via AJAX.

The complete list of reporting software - Part 1

Often organizations find it difficult to execute a software selection. Choosing and selecting a reporting software can be a complicated task sometimes. In this article and the following one I will give you a list of reporting software applications. I hope that this will help you find the best suited reporting software for your company’s needs.
A trend is starting to develop amongst Business Intelligence vendors and developers and that is the open source trend. To open source a piece of software usually means that the market for that type of software is saturated. Even if I don’t entirely agree with that statement, it appears that some vendors think that the reporting software market has reached a point where some of the software applications should become open source. Next I‘ll enclose a list of the open source reporting softwares:

Open source reporting software:

• Eclipse BIRT Project

BIRT Project stands for Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools Project. It is an open source software that provides reporting and BI capabilities for rich clients. It also provides some web applications, most of them based on Java and Java EE. The BIRT Project is using a wide range of reporting software within a single application, ranging from operational reporting to OLAP. It has two main components: a reports designer and a runtime component for generating reports. The BIRT project also includes a charting engine that is both fully integrated into the report designer and can be used as a standalone to integrate charts into an application.
BIRT Report designs are persisted as XML and can access a number of different data sources including SQL databases, JDO datastores, JFire Scripting Objects, POJOs, XML and Web Services.

• GNU Enterprise

GNU is a set of tools. It contains tools such as data-aware user interface, a reporting system and an application server. GNUe supports multi language interfaces, non-ASCII character sets and is compatible with most popular database systems.
GNUe is also a set of packages written using the tools that can be used to implement a full Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Packages include:
-human resources
-accounting
-customer relationship management
-project management
-supply chain
-e-commerce

• JasperReports

This is a reporting tool that can write to a variety of targets like PDF, HTML, Excel, RTF, ODT, Comma-separated values or XML files. It can be used in Java applications, including Java EE or web applications to generate content.
Many prominent Java IDEs provide instructions for users wishing to integrate JasperReports into a project.
-NetBeans

• iReport - a visual designer for JasperReports

-Eclipse

• Jaspersoft Studio - a re-write of iReport by the same team who originally developed iReport, backed by Jaspersoft
• JasperWave Report Designer - free Eclipse-based visual editor for JasperReports report engine

-IBM Websphere Studio Application Developer

• Pentaho

Pentaho or Pentaho BI Suite, contains several software targets applications combined in a suite. Reporting, dashboard, data-mining, workflow and ETL capabilities are combined in a single software application.
Pentaho uses a subscription model. Pentaho, under subscription model, provides support, services, and product enhancements for an annual subscription. As a commercial open source company, Pentaho "leads and sponsors" the open source projects that are core to its suite, giving it direct influence over software development.
Pentaho community version is licensed under Mozilla Public License version 1.1. Pentaho Enterprise versions are available under a commercial license. There are three variants of enterprise versions: Basic, Professional and Enterprise.

There are several reporting tools that I would like to “play” with. Tools that I would like  to be available open source. But now I won’t give any examples because in the next articles I will present you with a list of reporting software applications for commercial use. Some of them are free, but their source code is not available, so they are not exactly open source.

Proactive Business Intelligence!

We all know that Business Intelligence is present in every company at some level. The future of every company depends on the the quality of the adopted BI strategies. Business Intelligence is a term which sums up tools, processes and people that help the process of decision making. But this is only generally speaking. The real BI is different from company to company and because of its continuous development it got to a point where a decision making process is formed from many more other smaller decision making processes. The bigger the company is, the bigger the process is, thus the more decisions are taken by lower level and department management.

As you can see in the above figure, the time frame for the data to get into a reporting software is about 6-12 months.

Traditional BI has helped companies make decisions using historical analysis for a long time, but the data was stored at a level that there is no operational data to base decision. However, lately, the attention shifted more towards operational data. This is the key for reducing the reaction time, thus the need for a more proactive Business Intelligence solution appeared.
Strategic Business Intelligence or Reactive BI, as it is commonly known, is a time consuming process. The data is analyzed and reports are being created on a weekly or monthly basis. Sometimes, reports are created on a yearly basis. This is an excellent method when large sets of data are being analyzed, especially when the company is targeting a market with a large audience.This type of BI is usually used by senior management or higher level management and decision makers.
But this type of long-term analysis can also have its downfalls: because of the duration of the whole process, reactive BI can fall short of achieving deadlines. And the data latency increases the closer you get to the database or data warehouse. Also, a long management chain will extend the duration of the decision making process. To avoid this type of situations, proactive BI is the solution.
Even if the idea of real time Business Intelligence is impossible at this moment, the idea of real time intelligence at an operational level has started to develop more and more, especially when it comes to big companies and corporations. And because of the advances in technology and data processing tools, this new and revolutionary idea has started to expand to smaller companies as well.
The main objective of proactive business intelligence is to identify potential problems and issues so that front-line operators or department managers can solve them before reaching the client. Also, a shorter hierarchic chain means a shorter reaction time.
Proactive BI is also known as operational BI. Even if it’s hard to tell where the strategic BI ends and where the operational BI begins, at least in theory, at a department level we have already crossed the line towards a more operational business intelligence.
Using BI tools for monitoring and analyzing trends and behavior changes on smaller groups will give the opportunity of identifying problems at a smaller level. Using a reporting software to create reports when the numbers jump over the parameters that have been set may have results in real time, which could help the management to take better decisions.
Let’s take as an example a toys manufacturer. Even if during holiday seasons a lot more toys are being sold than in a regular day, the demand still has to be monitored. So if a reporting software is used to deliver daily reports concerning production and demand, the departments know what toys to make and when to manufacture them. This way they know that they have to increase or decrease the productivity of certain products even before the demand drops or spikes.
Proactive Business Intelligence can even be used for decision making at smaller levels. Empowering people at a department level with decision making is the only way to have a real time reaction to the reports. After all, a reporting software is worth nothing if it takes a long time to help you make a decision. A report that has to be passed through many hands before it reaches a decision-making authority is equally worthless.
I have been saying this for a long time and I will keep saying it: Business Intelligence has started to spread and develop a lot more during the last years. We can now see that it’s beginning to enclose its ramifications in all the departments of a company. Hiring the staff, purchasing the reporting software, expanding the business, these are all decision which must be considered from a BI point of view. And as much as we try to understand BI at a smaller level we will see that a proactive intelligence is needed for a business to stand.

The Future of Business Intelligence!

Business analysts are forecasting that Business Intelligence will develop into a main function which will aid the accomplishment of many organizations. But my question is: Isn’t BI already a main function in the accomplishment of an organization? All the major companies are already using Business Intelligence and more and more medium and small size companies are starting to implement its processes every day. This is happening because more and more business managers are realising that Business intelligence and its tools are imperative for increasing productivity and the quality of work and with that, the profit will grow as well. These companies are beginning to see the rewards of spatial information analysis and reporting through BI Tools. All these lead to smarter, more efficient decision-making. Using data warehouses, companies can store a huge amount of information about their clients. Using the data from the DW, taking it through several analysis applications and then through a reporting software, companies can get precious information that would improve the decision making process and the odds of success. These information can include attaining customers, refining the company’s operations, handling income more efficiently, minimizing hazards, predicting prospective problems and maximizing the profit.
Due to a continuous altering of the customer's lifestyle, companies nowadays need to track their customers’ daily activities and needs. We can take as an example the development of the location’s intelligence - which is a great decisional factor in customer targeting. Technical innovations also became a serious issue on any company’s agenda.
Companies these days use BI tools to collect, organize and analyze data about customers or future consumers via all sorts of smartphone and tablet applications. Customers are using their phones for search queries more often nowadays. These queries are stored in databases where all this valuable data can then be analyzed and transformed into useful information which companies can use in their predictions. In addition, marketing and advertising methods have been developed in order to attain an edge in targeted markets. This has triggered a decline in marketing cost, which in return has produced more effective and productive marketing methods.
As a result, an international market has been created, with no geographical boundaries. By the year 2015, it is estimated that one billion men and women will access social media communities, and most of them will use an area based software. Marketers have always put great value on the ability of talking straight to their clients, focusing on the customer’s needs and demands. This strategy has provided a competitive edge by detecting the clients’ expectations and predicting potential trends. Therefore, they were able to implement even more powerful business techniques, which provided superior opportunities to reach financial accomplishment. Also, the companies are now able to anticipate potential issues before taking place. 
  There are elements of majority of people’s life, like social, cloud and cellular computing which will allow companies to control this technology. These techniques and tools can be used to attain prospective clients. Incorporating promotional offers, advertising, playing the consumer loyalty card, assessing the level of purchase into applications is a great way to benefit from the customers’ love for technology. These techniques, combined with the use of real time BI tools to attain instant reports about the customer’s needs and expectations, might be essential to achieve success in today’s dynamic business environment.
Social computing allows a better insight over the customers’ needs and trends through a close exchange of informations. For example: a customer encountered a problem with his computer. Typically, he logs on the social network of a popular computer parts supplier and writes his problem down. The company will help him solve his problem, but in the same time it will be able to recognize the customers’ purchase pattern and also make him an offer for the spare parts that he might need.
Cloud computing. There are lots of things that can be said about cloud computing, but there are two main ways in which a company can use this tool. The first of its uses it’s all about the needs of the consumer - it provides a way of identifying the customers’ trends. The second common use it’s about the company’s ability to access applications and storage space remotely through a Internet connection. Companies can use it for data storage and they could access it from anywhere in the world. This way they can analyze and use the resulted informations in real time, without being confined to the company’s headquarters, where the main server is. They could implement reporting software applications and reports and send them in all kinds of formats.
Cellular computing (or mobile computing, as it’s called today) grants a company the ability to analyze a client's needs and demands. People nowadays use smartphones and tablets on a daily basis. Analyzing their queries, companies can identify the trends and implement the best possible marketing techniques.

In the end, businesses who can’t keep up with this burst of technology innovations will be at a severe disadvantage. As for Business Intelligence, its processes and tools are advancing every day. And this technology and tools have become crucial for any company which is planning to turn out a profit. As I already said, big business and enterprises already use BI and the small and medium sized ones will have to adapt as well.