Information, information, information...

Computer applications are becoming, more than ever, open to numerous different parties

• Internal company users through intranet
• External suppliers through Extranet
• End consumers through an online shop

The buying behaviour of a customer, decisions made by an employee or deliveries of a supplier are all facts recorded in the history log of the information systems which ultimately, produce millions of records.

Information becoming inteligence

These records consists strategic information that can then be analyzed to extrapolate trends, monitor that all processes proceed smoothly or decide for one solution or another. Nonetheless, the problem arises from the analysis of this huge amount of information. Humans are able to interpret, compare and make sense of some numbers (amounts, quantities, volumes, ...), hoever this ability is ineffective in dealing with thousands or millions of information. It becomes,therefore, mandatory to employ reporting tools that can help with the presentation of relevant data which can be filtered, consolidated, aggregated, formatted and make them understandable to assist decision makers in their strategic choices.

Legacy Reporting systems

After fifteen years of dominance in the software reporting sector, the commercial packages are, since the last couple of years, under severe pressure by Open-Source Solutions. Having, software licenses that are free, the latter have now reached a level of relevance and robustness equivalent to the legacy commercial solutions and, for their part, continue to cede market share.

This trend is all the more accelerated by the current economic environment. In fact many large companies are now trying to migrate to these new, free, open source solutions to remove the burden of licensing costs of their proprietory reporting packages.

BIRT: The free inteligent Reporting engine

BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) is an open source reporting tool enabling the elaboration of effective data relations that can have an impact. Developed within the Eclipse Foundation, it has now become the de facto standard with over 7 million downloads.

BIRT is the ideal reporting solution for Java / JEE and integrates seamlessly with any other type of application (eg PHP,. Net, Flash, SOA, ...).

The advantages of this solution are numerous. It has:

- All the functionalities of a reporting product
- A redduced cost of ownership
- A large active community
- A productive graphical toolset
- The ability for immediate deployment