Users of SAP's Business Information Warehouse will soon have additional capabilities for analyzing customer, financial, and supply-chain data. Under a reseller agreement disclosed Tuesday, SAP has embedded Crystal Decisions' reporting software in an upcoming release of SAP BW, letting business analysts and managers generate up to 500 analytical reports.

SAP BW is the data warehouse component of the mySAP Business Intelligence system that provides access to data generated by SAP's enterprise applications. About 1,000 companies use SAP BW, and another 3,000 are in various stages of implementation. SAP already provides a Web-based query tool, Business Explorer, for querying the data warehouse. But users have been asking for the ability to generate pre-defined, formatted reports such as those generated by the Crystal Enterprise and Crystal Reports Designer products, according to SAP.

Under terms of the reseller deal, SAP BW owners will have the right to generate up to 500 reports using the embedded technology. Crystal Decisions provides several thousand pre-defined reports for analyzing customer data, such as sales opportunities and deal sizes, as well as human-resource, supply-chain, financial, and product life-cycle data. Users that want more than 500 reports or want to customize reports will have to buy a separate license.

SAP and Crystal Decisions have been building the reporting capabilities into Business Information Warehouse 3.0a, which is in beta test and is expected to be generally available in the second quarter of next year. Pricing for the new release was not available.