Thrive in a Difficult Economy

Organisations have reprioritised their focus around immediate cost reduction, rapid revenue generation, greater business transparency and risk mitigation. To shrink the time it takes to realise value, minimise acquisition cost and maximise results, organisations are demanding real-time, meaningful insights into their business information.

There's a strong need for immediate access to data that's directly related to the financial health of a business. Many industries have to produce in-depth, highly accurate reports to meet stringent regulatory and compliance requirements. You are also likely to want to interact with your data to see how various scenarios could affect your organisation's ability to perform.

Additionally, your organisation is faced with the challenge of having a vast array of information available from disparate sources. Even when useful data is available, you're often too overwhelmed to find it and IT is too busy to deliver.

To manage operations effectively, contain costs and meet customer demands, you need access to complete and integrated business information. With insight into every aspect of your business, you can monitor performance, spot inefficiencies and identify opportunities for growth.

To thrive in this difficult business climate, you need to make faster, better, more informed decisions. Advanced reporting software transforms businesses by freeing your corporate data. It will deliver the right information in the right format at the right time to the right people – internal decision-makers, customers, suppliers and other key stakeholders.

SAP BUSINESSOBJECTS

SAP BusinessObjects software offers intuitive, versatile reporting solutions and proven business analytics, so you can gain insight into your business information and performance.

Crystal Reports reporting and Xcelsius visualisation tools are open, action-oriented and connected. They deliver a complete, intuitive profile of business performance using any data from any application and any platform and ease collaboration to improve decisions and resolve issues. The solutions automatically detect significant risks and performance issues within and beyond the business.

GAIN INSIGHT WITH CRYSTAL REPORTS

Crystal Reports software allows users to create highly formatted reports connected to virtually any data source. The reports' interactivity empowers your business users to manipulate data, while decreasing the number of reports IT needs to maintain.

With Crystal Reports, you gain broader insight and can align strategy, optimise decisions, and improve risk management, regardless of underlying transactional systems.

Crystal Reports Server 2008 hands control to the end-user. By making reports more interactive and easy for business users to create themselves, IT is freed up and the business becomes more productive.

Databases are not user-friendly tools and extracting database content usually requires coding skills. But Crystal Reports allows users to easily extract and format data in a consumable way.

With Crystal Reports Server 2008, they can consolidate data from numerous sources into a single source. Reports can be distributed either via the web or embedded in familiar enterprise applications such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat.

This enables users to interact meaningfully with the data - for example sorting, filtering and drilling down - in a way that takes reporting beyond the limitations of a printed document. A once-static collection of numbers can now serve as a dynamic collaboration tool.

What's New in Crystal Reports Server 2008

Crystal Reports Server 2008 connects to virtually any data source, including Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, Oracle, IBM DB2 and Linux Servers.

It empowers end-users with relatively few technical skills to design, explore and deliver reports that provide a trusted foundation on which to base decisions.

It is a complete report and dashboard management solution which enables you to securely open, view, interact with and share reports and dashboards over the Web.

Crystal Reports Server 2008 will enable you to:

• Find answers to your business questions quicker by getting to the information you need with on-report interactive parameters and sorting - online or offline
• Make fact-based decisions by modelling the potential outcome of your decisions with what-if scenarios embedded in reports
• Act faster with operational reports that communicate with back-office systems
• Deliver more compelling presentations by embedding reports that include interactive charts and graphs, or dynamic video files

The recent release is tailored for organisations that need to share reports broadly. Key new features include:

• Manage dashboards designed with Xcelsius software and Crystal Reports documents in one place
• Publish a single report to thousands of recipients and personalise it for each one
• Build customised information views with a Web-based dashboard framework
• Integrated reporting into Microsoft SharePoint
• Combine up to 100 named and 250 concurrent-access licences on a single server

BETTER DECISION-MAKING WITH XCELSIUS

Xcelsius software from SAP BusinessObjects illuminates your organisation by providing consolidated views of key metrics, so you can answer your business questions at-a-glance.

It enables you to leverage dynamic, customisable data via visualisation software that enables users of different skill levels to create insightful and engaging dashboards from any data source with point-and-click ease.

Xcelsius software illuminates your business by providing consolidated views of key metrics, so you can answer your business questions at-a-glance. You can interact with your data like never before with what-if scenarios and other visual components - and use your data to make informed decisions.

With Xcelsius, you can:

• Create dashboards for personal use - Xcelsius Engage gives you the power to transform complex data into a comprehensive dashboard. Create interactive dashboards from Microsoft Excel or a live data source, and export your dashboard to a familiar format – Microsoft Office, Flash (SWF) files, Adobe PDF and Adobe Air
• Create visually stunning and interactive presentations - Xcelsius Present is a powerful presentation tool that bridges the gap between static spreadsheets and the need for visual, interactive presentations. Bring Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to life with interactive charts and what-if scenarios - no training or programming is required

CRYSTAL REPORTS VISUAL ADVANTAGE

With Crystal Reports Visual Advantage, you can gain even more functionality for compelling reports. This bundled product includes Crystal Reports and Xcelsius Engage, giving you the power to create highly-formatted reports with what-if scenario models, interactive dashboards and charts – and deliver them via the Web, email, Microsoft Office, Adobe PDF or embedded in enterprise applications. As a result, you can leverage your reports to make better operational and strategic decisions

FIND OUT MORE

For further information and pricing, please contact your Phoenix Account Manager on 0845 265 1265 or email info@phoenixs.co.uk

To learn how Crystal Reports can help you interact with, visualise, design and deploy your data, download the Crystal Reports Server Solution Brief at www.phoenixs.co.uk/crs.aspx