Seagate Etches New Crystal - Product Development

ENT, Dec 13, 2000 by Alicia Costanza

Seagate Software wants to tell the world that it is aware of the need for Web-based enterprise reporting systems -- and that it is working on it.

Seagate, known for its reporting tool Crystal Reports, has laid out plans for an entirely Web-based reporting solution designed for managing the delivery of information across the Internet.

The new product will be named Crystal Enterprise and is expected to hit the market sometime during the first half of 2001. "Crystal Enterprise is really the next generation of Seagate Info. This is a leapfrogging. We are changing the name to build on the Crystal brand, but there's also a significant enhancement over the Info product," says Andrew Handford, director of product management at Seagate Software.

On tap for the reworked and renamed offering is a report publishing infrastructure, an open API, an application server with cluster fail over, fault tolerance, and load balancing.

But one of the most significant new facets is that Crystal Enterprise is built specifically for the Web.

Many Web reporting tools on the market today started out as client/server tools that had Web functionality added to them, but this is not the case with Crystal Enterprise. "Our interface is zero client. Seagate Info is retrofitting for the Web, but Crystal Enterprise is built specifically for the Web," Handford says. "We will now have a benchmark as a Web application, we wanted to build a product from the ground up for the Web."

The changes that will be included in the release of Crystal Enterprise are news, but Mike Schiff, vice president, e-business and business intelligence, at Current Analysis, says the name change is the most important aspect of this announcement. "The most significant thing is that the Seagate name is missing. They are back to using the name Crystal. They are going after enterprise reporting and showing they can do more than just make disks," Schiff says. "They are building on the Crystal brand. Everyone uses Crystal Reports and knows what it is. That can only help. I am sure that they are going to spin off Seagate Software and create a Crystal Software, I would expect that."

The product announcement was a preview, and Seagate still has not declared when Crystal Enterprise will grace the market.

"It's in final release candidate, and we'll release it when our beta customers tell us it's ready," Handford says. "We tend to make announcements after the product ships, but we're trying to get excitement up about it. We don't want people to mistake this for a product announcement."

Schiff thinks Seagate's approach to the product announcement is a good one. "They did clever things and they're keeping themselves alive. All of the focus on Seagate is usually on the disk drives," Schiff says. "They are definitely scaling up and moving into the enterprise, and I am pleased they are using the Crystal name. They need to remind the world that they're out there. People need to know you're there and who you are."