Business Objects vs. Crystal Decisions

We did a comparison of Crystal decisions vs business objects for an american bank and found business objects to be more powerful, especially in data mining tasks where large amounts of data needs to be ploughed and sifted to obtain patterns like customer buying pattern... Customers who bought nappies also bought what? kind of queries. You can see the results of these kind of queries on amazon.com the site gives you "customers who bought this book also bought the following titles". Crystal decisions is fine for routine reporting.

You could also look at Informatica, Oracle Discoverer and Oracle OLAP express.

Most of these connect to all the major databases

Hope this helps.

Business Objects has more of a business decision focus for reporting. Hence the power it has over Crystal. In order to enable this higher level of functionality it requires significantly more configuration in order to use it. Meta data level tagshave to be identified to tie to the information for reporting. It really can be quite a job getting this configured based on the data you have and how it is stored. You would probably need an administrator to set it up based of course on your in-house skill sets. Once set-up it is then a matter of drag and drop. On the other hand Crystal can be easily configured. simple reports can be learned quickly. More complex reports could be set-up as public by a more experienced individual. You could probably even get someone from a local consulting firm to quickly create some of your more complex reports for a reasonable fee. Bottom line - Business Objects can give you more functionality but also requires additional support. Crystal will give your sales force a quick solution to routine needs. I hope this helps. Each product is Sybase compatible.

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