SAP has made good on its promise to boost the reporting capabilities of its Business Information Warehouse (BW), the data-warehousing component of the mySAP Business Intelligence system. This week, SAP BW 3.0b began shipping with built-in reporting technology provided by Crystal Decisions. The two vendors also revealed a jointly developed version of Crystal Decision's Crystal Enterprise reporting software tailored for SAP that provides additional functionality.

SAP BW extracts data from R/3 applications for analyzing customer, financial, and supply-chain data. While SAP provides its own Web-based query tool, users have been asking for the ability to generate formatted reports. The Crystal Decisions technology built into SAP BW, called Crystal Enterprise-SAP Edition, will include several thousand predefined reports.

The Crystal Enterprise-Enhanced SAP Edition software is sold separately and lets users go beyond the capabilities built into SAP BW and create new reports or modify existing reports. The software can also pull data from non-SAP sources. The product, priced at $750 per user, conforms to SAP's role-based security, authorization, and single sign-on specifications.