Brio Technology Inc hopes to tap into the huge installed base of SAP AG users with its Brio.Report 5.2 tool, which it claims will make building reporting applications on SAP and other data sources easier. The tool is the first to use direct data objects (DDO), a technology acquired when Brio bought Sqribe last year.
Ian Robinson, vice president of the enterprise reporting business unit at Brio, describes the DDO component as a middleware driver that lets us access the SAP data. Using the Brio software, a user can step through the SAP business application programming interfaces to get a graphical representation of the hierarchy of stored procedures. Once a report has been graphically laid out it can then generate in SQR code.
By giving users an easier way to navigate SAP data, Brio hopes to pick up a lot of trade from SAP customers, in the same way that it has done by Brio Report becoming the official PeopleSoft reporting tool. However, Robinson acknowledges that Brio has scant chance of gaining official status with SAP. The German company likes to develop its business intelligence tools.
The Brio reporting tool also has DDO drivers that allow it to represent data from XML, COM, Corba, flat file and JDBC sources. Brio.Report 5.2 is available now, priced at $10,000 per server.
