Is this an exiting stat tor me? From my personal perspective, you bet! Why?
I have been working with Crystal Reports since November of 1994. And yes, I have seen much good and much bad and much boring and much exciting. I have seen friendships built working with Crystal Reports. I have seen friendships irreparably broken. I have seen Crystal Reports as part of Crystal Services, Crystal Decisions, Seagate Software, Silver Lake group, Business Objects and SAP. Through it all I believed in Crystal Reports. Believed in the people who built it, who tested it, who supported it, marketed it, sold it and more. The greatest bunch of people anyone could ever work with!
Over the last few years though I have seen the growth of Web Intelligence (Webi) Reporting, Lumira, Visual Intelligence and more. I could not help but wonder about the future of Crystal Reports. And this statistic once again confirms for me that Crystal Reports has always been and still is "the de facto standard in reporting". This goes for the SAP Crystal Reports Designer as well as the SAP Crystal Reports SDK for Visual Studio .NET. Some may say a view is just a view and thus not a significant statistic. But I also know that "SAP Crystal Reports, developer version for Microsoft Visual Studio" is being downloaded 1000s of times per month.
Add to this support for RESTful Services for Crystal Reports, BI and Webi, SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise and I am starting to feel pretty good. It's been an interesting road to travel over the last 20 years, but I'm ready to go another 20...
