Business Objects has agreed to

Business Objects has agreed to buy Crystal Decisions in a deal valued at $820 million.

Crystal Decisions were on the verge of an IPO and their revenue grew by a third last year to $270m, while revenues at at Business Objects increased 9 per cent last year, to $455m. Their decision to sell to Business Objects has therefore stopped what would have been a rare technology IPO.

Although both companies are in the Business Intelligence market, Crystal specialised in reporting whilst Business Objects plays more in the Business Intelligence applications market, with a particular emphasis on querying and analysis. The intention is for Business Objects to keep the Crystal Decisions brands, particularly Crystal Reports, the brand leader in 'off the shelf' desktop reporting.

I was involved in an OLAP technology selection a few years back with Crystal (then Seagate Software), Business Objects and Cognos up for evaluation. I remember at the time finding it hard to work out exactly where Crystal/Seagate were coming from; they had recently aquired Holos - close to Express in terms of power and flexibility, but by no means a simple solution - and were packaging it up with Crystal Reports and Crystal Info as a complete business intelligence platform.

It was clear to us however that Holos was far too 'heavy duty' for us to consider (we weren't in the development game), whilst on the other hand Seagate were running an offer where they were giving away Crystal Reports and Crystal Info for up to five users. Looking back, we should probably have taken them up on the offer, but at the time it seemed like a confused message, the software was barely integrated, and we doubted whether they'd be around for much longer.

Since the BI tools were floated off from Seagate Software into Crystal Decisions, they do seem to have got their act together, and one of our clients is using Crystal Reports deployed as a J2EE application running under BEA Weblogic. However, I do wonder how much of Crystal's decision was due to Microsoft planning to embed reporting software in the next version of SQL Server; Crystal Reports was the reporting engine of choice for Microsoft shops and versions of it were bundled with Visual Basic, Visual Studio, and now Visual Studio.net. It'll be interesting to see how many of Crystal's customers Business Objects will keep when Microsoft SQL Reporting Services comes out.