It’s a German product, and their new v3 product allows report creation via web browser (with database and cube definition done via a Java applet). It’s extremely powerful, although I’ll admit that the learning curve to do super-smart stuff is quite steep. Small footprint (uses Tomcat), good licensing (concurrent users, site licenses), very fast, no Flash, works with any JDBC database.

Consider Steve Anderson’s recently published article as a source of inspiration:

http://gokubi.com/archives/salesforce-com-as-free-bolt-on-analytics-engine-for-any-database-app

While it runs on Linux, looks like clients must use Internet Explorer. If so, it’s another no-go for us.

I’m not requiring a tool that does ETL because (a) I’ve got my own set of scripts that process the data into simple-to-use, documented datasets and (b) because I’m more interested in finding a kick-arse front-end reporting tool that a “bells and whistles” do-everything-tool.

I’m looking for a web-based solution because my company does not use any Microsoft technologies — none at the back-end, none at the front-end. We use Macintosh or Linux, with only a scattering of PCs for some finance staff who love the old ways. And, let me tell you, it’s a blissful situation not having to deal with Windows and all its associated licensing.

So, I’d be open to a desktop reporting tool, as long as it’s available under all desktop platforms — Windows, Mac, Linux. The few that offer this typically don’t have a great back-end to power it all. Hence, the desire for a web-based front-end.

Oh, it’s also worth mentioning that our company is geographically spread throughout the world, so a desktop solution that has to talk to a back-end server would suffer from latency. A web-based solution would do all the processing on the server, located in the same place as our databases, so only the report results would be sent back to users. So, it would offer noticeably faster response times.

One of our biggest problems is that we’ve got a half-decent reporting environment already via our corporate wiki (see http://bit.ly/howto-report), but it doesn’t offer self-service capabilities (eg interactive crosstabs). So, I need something that offers more capability that is as accessible as our current tool — all staff can access it, we’re not limited by “per user” licensing that forces us to remove capabilities from users, etc.

We’ve look at all the tools above, and have ruled out practically all of them. None have jumped out as perfect for our needs.

I’m interested in the ‘I don’t want ETL’ – I don’t know enough about your requirements, but are you saying that you’ve got all your analysts’ data ready to just put in reports – the problem in my experience is that this is a very dangerous assumption to make, because ‘report culture’ always falls short of expectations.

Don’t understand why the desktop solutions don’t appeal? That’s the route we went with ORYX, our new product.

He says “nice integration with salesforce too”.

I hadn’t realised they have an on-demand solution.

On the topic of SaaS / On-demand, it’s a difficult choice for reporting. Using SaaS typically requires uploading the data, which means you’re probably not updating the data that much. Many products have command-line upload tools that can be scheduled. Birst even has a “behind-the-firewall” tool that lets the cloud-based service access our own database. Then there’s the standard benefits of SaaS, such as automatic upgrades, never having to solve installation problems and not having to worry about platform compatibility (eg operating systems).

On the down-side, few SaaS solutions do good user provisioning and Single Sign-on. In fact, they try to go to extremes to help you “share your data” by inviting people to collaborate. This isn’t a good idea with sensitive corporate data that we want to keep within the company.

The data on which we wish to report is in our corporate databases, not in Salesforce. Also, the reporting capabilities in Salesforce are not sufficient for our desires and would need to be accessible to people without a Salesforce login.