The new service offering – branded as crystalreports.com – is best described as a managed report sharing environment that lets users exchange reports created by Business Objects’ Crystal Reports software over the web.
The service more or less offers the same report-sharing and notification functionality included in licensed version of Crystal Reports Server that was released in early 2005 and is also targeted at small and mid-sized enterprises.
James Thomas, a director of product marketing at San Jose, California-based Business Objects, expects the service to pique the interest of smaller, mid-sized firms that have invested heavily in Crystal Reports desktop report design software and are now looking at way to share them across departments and other parts of the enterprise in a secure and controlled way.
It’s a logical place to start since one of the most pressing and compelling needs for companies today is getting more information out to their workers, he said.
Like Crystal Reports Server, Business Objects is hoping that crystalreports.com will get early traction in departments and small and mid-sized firms who have limited time and resources at their disposal and have up to now been priced out by the cost of building and maintaining complex Web-based reporting infrastructures.
People at small and mid-sized firms have a tendency to save reports as PDF documents and email them out, which immediately makes them un-secure and un-versioned, Thomas said. We believe that crystalreports.com as an SaaS will offer them a quicker, controlled and more cost-effective way to do this, especially for companies that are challenged in terms and IT dollars and resources.
Business Objects said it worked with outsource partner OpSource to get the service up and running.
Thomas recognizes that the inherent challenges of using the Web as an applications delivery platform and is vary of the recent service outages experienced by Salesforce.com customers. But he said that crystal.com is based on a multi-tenancy model with several redundant servers built into the architecture.
It’s true that you submit yourself to a whole new level of security when you put your applications on the Web and offer them as a SaaS. But we’ve done a ton of performance and reliability testing [on crystalreports.com], he said.
Pricing for the crystalreports.com comes in basic and premium service levels with a phased geographic rollout.
The basic level, provided as a free option for customers of Crystal Reports XI, includes support for up to ten named users who can view a limited number of reports (around 60) over the Web. It’s available now in North America.
The premium level is a based on a classic SaaS monthly subscription of $20 per user, per month (as an introductory price) and includes user and group level security features that come as standard in Crystal Reports Server. This service will be offered to North American customers later this quarter.
Global availability of both levels of service is expected sometime in the second half of 2006.
A move to SaaS has been on the cards since Business Objects made its Crystal XI platform available to subscribers of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange on-demand application sharing platform – which can be likened to an eBay-type site for selling and distributing on-demand applications. Crystal XI is part of 150 other application listings that also include Adobe and Skype.
Thomas said that AppExchange was a good way to test out the SaaS model and a brand new subscription-based pricing model that Business Objects has never had before against the BI reporting software market in general.
We’ve been focusing on this for some time and [AppExchange] was the quickest route to market and to understand customers, he said. We’ve now taken a leadership position and are hoping to learn a lot more. But Salesforce.com shows this can be done and the market seems to be getting more familiar and comfortable with the SaaS model.
Research from analyst firm IDC predicts an increase in SaaS, pegging spend in this area to reach $10.7bn by 2009, representing a CAGR of 21%. Gartner concurs, believing that by 2010 30% of new applications will be deployed as a service, primarily to the mid-market.
Thomas neither confirm nor discounted if or when more parts of Business Objects BI portfolio would be offered as SaaS.
We have no plans right now to do anything else. Our intention is to learn from customers where they want to go next in terms of Saas. But we have a platform in place that allows us to go wherever customer take us next. It’ll be exciting.
He said that Business Objects hasn’t yet set up a special SaaS division per se; but that the company would be looking to leverage partners like Digital River that run its e-stores to bolster its SaaS marketing and distribution capabilities.
Business Objects isn’t the first BI vendor to dabble seriously in SaaS. SAS Institute Inc has offered parts of its BI and analytic tools and applications portfolio under a similar hosted, on-demand model for several years.
Originally dubbed as Intellivisor, SAS re-branded its SaaS offerings to SAS Solutions OnDemand in January this year. The Cary, North Carolina-based company now provides SaaS versions of its SAS Enterprise BI solution alongside packaged solutions for Web analytics, marketing automation, and supplier relationship management.
According to Richard Roach, marketing director for SAS Solutions OnDemand, at Cary, North Carolina-based SAS, the SaaS business did around $20m of business last year, making it in effect the largest SaaS supplier of BI and analytics in the market today.
We’ve been in the business of providing [SaaS] for the past five years, Roach said, dismissing any suggestion that Business Objects has somehow stolen a lead in the market.
