Crystal Decisions Delivers Enterprise Web Reporting For Microsoft Visual Studio .NET

Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET to provide leading reporting capabilities to Microsoft .NET Developers

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, February 13, 2002 - At the VSLive! Developers Conference in San Francisco today, Crystal Decisions, an information management company, announced that its award-winning Crystal Reports will be included in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET is a special edition of the industry standard for high-performance report design that will be fully integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, the comprehensive tool for rapidly building and integrating XML Web services and applications.

Crystal Decisions worked closely with Microsoft to develop a special edition of Crystal Reports that enables Web developers to quickly and easily create interactive reports for enterprise Web applications right from within Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. Rich interactive reports can be shared over the Internet through Crystal Decisions' Business Intelligence Web Services to enable enterprise customers or business partners to host reports inside their own applications. As a result, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET customers can generate new revenue opportunities and tighter, more successful business relationships.

"Microsoft is pleased that Crystal Decisions is delivering leading reporting technology to Microsoft Visual Studio .NET developers," said Tom Button, vice president for the Developer and Platform Evangelism Division for Microsoft Corporation. "The integration of Crystal Reports within the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET development environment provides developers with versatile and easy to use reporting capabilities for developing next generation enterprise Web applications."

"Support of the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment will become a significant factor when developing powerful enterprise applications," said Dan Vesset, research manager at IDC. "The inclusion of Crystal Reports will help serve as a catalyst for its quick adoption by the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET development community, thus helping companies standardize reporting across their enterprise."

Customer Success

Horizon Software International is a food services management software provider that has more over 8,000 installations nationwide. Horizon's Web-based product BOSSCentral manages inventory, procurement, distribution, production, menu planning and point-of-sale data for institutional food departments in schools, colleges, universities, corporations, restaurants and healthcare organizations.

Horizon Software's original product application was a client-server product that required daily data synchronization. Their customers asked for a Web-based solution to make their administration duties faster, cheaper and more efficient.

"To develop BOSSCentral, our IT development team wanted to work in a Microsoft .NET environment but also wanted to leverage the knowledge base they already had with Crystal Reports; the developers had been using Crystal Decisions' technology for more than five years," said Michael Williamson, Horizon Software executive vice-president, research and development. "Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET was a natural choice for us to develop our new Web-based product, allowing us to respond to our customers' requests quickly and cost-effectively."

"With over ten million licenses shipped, Crystal Decisions is a leader in enterprise Web development," said Tony Wind, chief technology officer at Crystal Decisions. "This new version of Crystal Reports provides developers with flexible Business Intelligence Web Services and demonstrates our commitment to providing the tools to embrace the power of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET with our award-winning technology."

Not only will Crystal Reports ship in the English version of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET but it is also be included in all eight localized languages in which Microsoft Visual Studio .NET ships. Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET offers seamless integration with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET, Visual C# .NET and Visual C++ .NET, as well as third party languages that target Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. Developers using previous editions of Crystal Reports can immediately leverage these assets within Microsoft Visual Studio .NET applications by simply converting the .rpt files to Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET.

For More Information

Crystal Decisions offers a complete range of integrated enterprise Web reporting solutions that extend the value of reporting with market-leading analytics and the underlying infrastructure for enterprise-wide applications. For more information on Crystal Decisions' technologies and services, phone 1-800-877-2340 (North America) or 1-604-681-3435 (International), or visit the Crystal Decisions Web site at www.crystaldecisions.com.

About Crystal Decisions

Crystal Decisions, formerly Seagate Software, is a privately held Seagate company owned by a group of investors that include Silver Lake Partners and Texas Pacific Group. Crystal Decisions is an information management company, which provides award-winning reporting, analysis, and information delivery solutions. The company's world-class products are used by millions of customers in thousands of companies worldwide and include, Crystal Analysis, Crystal Enterprise, Crystal Reports and Holos. Crystal Decisions can be found on the Web at www.crystaldecisions.com.


Crystal Decisions, Crystal Reports, Crystal Enterprise, Crystal Analysis and Holos are either a registered trademark or trademark of Crystal Decisions Inc., in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

For further information, contact:
Ian Galbraith
Public Relations, (604) 974-2370
ian.galbraith@crystaldecisions.com