Crystal Decisions

Last updated

Crystal Decisions (previously known as Seagate Software Information Management Group) was a company that was known for its business intelligence products.

The company was formed when hard disk drive manufacturer Seagate Technology acquired Holistic Systems and Crystal Services with the intention of pursuing better profit margins in the software market. Holistic Systems had a wide range of sales offices, infrastructure and the Holos OLAP product, whilst Crystal Services had good OEM deals for the Crystal Reports database reporting product that they had written. The first new product from the combined company was Seagate Info, which later evolved to become known as Crystal Enterprise. Crystal Analysis followed as an OLAP client.

The company's structure reflected its heritage, with OLAP technologies being developed out of the former Holistic Systems R&D site in Ipswich, Suffolk, England and Relational Database technologies being developed out of the former Crystal Services R&D centre in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Crystal Decisions was acquired by Business Objects in December 2003. As part of this acquisition, the former research and development site in Ipswich, Suffolk, England, was closed with a loss of about 80 jobs in order to centralize development in Vancouver and Paris, with the support for the Holos product being outsourced to Raspberry Software based near Ipswich.

The Holos product line has now[ when? ] ceased.

Business Objects was purchased by SAP in March 2008.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oracle Corporation</span> American multinational computer corporation

Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. In 2023, the company’s seat in Forbes Global 2000 was 80. The company sells database software and cloud computing. Oracle's core application software is a suite of enterprise software products, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, human capital management (HCM) software, customer relationship management (CRM) software, enterprise performance management (EPM) software, Customer Experience Commerce and supply chain management (SCM) software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SAP</span> German multinational enterprise-software company

SAP SE is a German multinational software company based in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg. It develops enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. The company is the world's leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seagate Technology</span> American data storage company

Seagate Technology Holdings plc is an American data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979. Since 2010, the company has been incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Fremont, California, United States.

Cognos Incorporated was an Ottawa, Ontario-based company making business intelligence (BI) and performance management (PM) software. Founded in 1969, at its peak Cognos employed almost 3,500 people and served more than 23,000 customers in over 135 countries until being acquired by IBM on January 31, 2008. While no longer an independent company, the Cognos name continues to be applied to IBM's line of business intelligence and performance management products.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SAP Business One</span> Business management software (ERP)

SAP Business One is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application designed for small and medium-sized enterprises, and marketed by the German company SAP SE. Its goal is the automation of key business functions in finance, operations, and human resources.

Business Objects was an enterprise software company, specializing in business intelligence (BI). Business Objects was acquired in 2007 by German company SAP AG. The company claimed more than 46,000 customers in its final earnings release prior to being acquired by SAP. Its flagship product was BusinessObjects XI, with components that provide performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, as well as enterprise information management. Business Objects also offered consulting and education services to help customers deploy its business intelligence projects. Other toolsets enabled universes and ready-written reports to be stored centrally and made selectively available to communities of the users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Crystal Reports</span> Business intelligence software

Crystal Reports is a business intelligence application marketed to small- and medium-sized businesses by SAP.

Holos was an influential OLAP product of the 1990s. Developed by Holistic Systems in 1987, the product remained in use until around 2004. The core of the Holos Server was a business intelligence (BI) virtual machine. The Holos Language was a very broad language in that it covered a wide range of statements and concepts, including the reporting system, business rules, OLAP data, SQL data, device properties, analysis, forecasting, and data mining. Holos Server provided an array of different, but compatible, storage mechanisms for its multi-cube architecture: memory, disk, SQL. It was therefore the first product to provide "hybrid OLAP" (HOLAP). The Holos Client was both a design and delivery vehicle, and this made it quite large. Around about 2000, the Holos Language was made object-oriented (HL++) with a view to allowing the replacement of the Holos Client with a custom Java or VB product. However, the company were never sold on this, and so the project was abandoned. Before its demise, the Holos Server product ran under Windows NT, VMS, plus about 10 flavors of UNIX, and accessed over half-a-dozen different SQL databases. It was also ported to several different locales, including Japanese.

Essbase is a multidimensional database management system (MDBMS) that provides a platform upon which to build analytic applications. Essbase began as a product from Arbor Software, which merged with Hyperion Software in 1998. Oracle Corporation acquired Hyperion Solutions Corporation in 2007. Until late 2005 IBM also marketed an OEM version of Essbase as DB2 OLAP Server.

Crystal Analysis is an On Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) application for analysing business data originally developed by Seagate Software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hyperion Solutions</span> American software company

Hyperion Solutions Corporation was a software company located in Santa Clara, California, which was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2007. Many of its products were targeted at the business intelligence (BI) and business performance management markets, and as of 2013 were developed and sold as Oracle Hyperion products. Hyperion Solutions was formed from the merger of Hyperion Software and Arbor Software in 1998.

Business intelligence software is a type of application software designed to retrieve, analyze, transform and report data for business intelligence. The applications generally read data that has been previously stored, often - though not necessarily - in a data warehouse or data mart.

Raspberry Software is a software company based near Ipswich in Suffolk, England, which in the past offered support for legacy applications and currently develops software for mobile devices. The company has been quite successful, winning the Anglian Business Award 2005 for Technology, after just a year in business.

Simba Technologies Inc. is a software company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Simba specializes in products for ODBC, JDBC, OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO) and XML for Analysis (XMLA). The company licenses data connectivity technologies, and provides software development for Microsoft Windows, Linux, UNIX, Mac and mobile device platforms. Simba Technologies was founded as PageAhead Software in Vancouver and Seattle, Washington in 1991 and changed its name in 1995. Customers include Microsoft, Oracle Corporation, MIS AG, SAP AG and Descisys.

Panopticon Software was a multi-national data visualization software company specializing in monitoring and analysis of real-time data. The firm was headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. It partnered with software companies, including SAP, Thomson Reuters, Kx Systems, and One Market Data (OneTick). The company's name is derived from the Greek: 'pan' for all, 'optic' for sight. The company name is derived from the word panopticon which is an architectural concept originally intended to facilitate surveillance of prisons.

Causata is an enterprise software company based in San Mateo, California, United States with development offices in London, England, UK. It provides software which is used by business-to-consumer marketers to manage interactions with customers. The company launched the fourth version of its products in February, 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SAP HANA</span> Database management system by SAP

SAP HANA is an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system developed and marketed by SAP SE. Its primary function as the software running a database server is to store and retrieve data as requested by the applications. In addition, it performs advanced analytics and includes extract, transform, load (ETL) capabilities as well as an application server.

John G. Schwarz. is a business executive and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of Visier Inc. and on the board of directors of Synopsys, Teradata, and Avast Software.

Datawatch Corporation was an American software company that creates and sells self-service data preparation solutions. The entire platform included Datawatch Monarch Complete, Monarch Server and Monarch Swarm.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arcplan</span> Business intelligence software company

Arcplan is a software for business intelligence (BI), budgeting, planning & forecasting (BP&F), business analytics and collaborative Business Intelligence. It is the enhancement of the enterprise software inSight® and dynaSight of the former German provider arcplan Information Services GmbH.

References