Last month, investment management technology vendor Indata announced the rollout of a new Web-based reporting solution based on Microsoft's one-year-old SQL Server Reporting Services. It's not alone: other Microsoft partners like Proclarity and Lumigent either already have or are planning to support the technology, giving Microsoft an opportunity to challenge long established reporting system vendor Business Objects' Crystal Reports. And customers have taken notice.

"These are rough estimates, but since Reporting Services was announced, I'd say about 80 percent of deals involve some level of integration with the product," said Rex Parker, senior product manager at Proclarity, which first came out with support of the product timed with Microsoft's initial release. "In other words in about 80 percent of our conversations with customers we are responding to questions about how to integrate with Reporting Services."

At Indata, SQL Server Reporting Services will replace an internally developed system for creating and distributing reports that wasn't as flexible. Indata's investment manager clients will be able to use the product to create both internal reports, such as accounting-oriented reports about the value of holdings, as well as external reports to customers.

"Investment managers need to produce summary reports each month to clients, and they all do it a little differently," said Dave Csiki, Indata's managing director. "We also can do billing reports. When clients are sending out invoices we've found a lot of systems don't automate that process. We're providing automated reports based on SQL Server that will accommodate the myriad of fee schedules that their clients will throw at them."

For Indata, adoption of Reporting Services offers three broad improvements, said Csiki: First, clients will get the centralization of reports within an application that's embedded within the system, rather than having to interact with a third party provider; second, from a programming standpoint it's very flexible; and third, it's extremely scalable.

The story behind Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, according to Peter Blackburn, who is co-author, along with William Vaughn, of Hitchhiker's Guide to SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services, is that an early demo of the product was given in February 2003. Blackburn writes that the reaction to the demo was so strong that customers petitioned to have it released early. Consequently, it was released at the beginning of 2004, a year ahead of the scheduled release of the next generation of SQL Server (code named Yukon), though originally the two released were planned to be simultaneous.

Lumigent plans to begin offering customers the choice of Crystal Reports or Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services with its Entegra data auditing product this summer. Entegra, which creates a who, what, when and how audit trail of the activity on databases, was initially Microsoft-based, though now it also supports other platforms. It currently ships with Crystal Reports because a year and a half ago when the company had to make a decision about which report system to use, the Microsoft solution was not yet officially launched.

Last fall, after watching Reporting Services' performance in the market and fielding questions from customers, Lumigent gave it a second look.

"First the cost, bundled as part of SQL Server, is very cost-effective for our customers; it's of course fully integrated with SQL Server; and because it's XML-based it's very flexible - it's easy to adjust and change reports," said Peter Utzschneider, director of product strategy at Lumigent. "Microsoft is our largest installed base, and with Yukon coming out later this year, we want to be able to offer customers a choice."

Proclarity, meanwhile, came out with its second version of support for the product in November. The company specializes in analysis of OLAP data and allowing users to browse multi-dimensional levels of data. As its product is focused on interaction, Reporting Services was seen as complimentary. Users could for example, generate reports based on their interactions with and analysis of data.

The company has since embedded some of its interactive abilities into its version of Reporting Services, including allowing users to click on hyperlinks in reports to get further detail beyond static numbers. And, what might be of particular interest to the financial industry, it allows users to pull data from reports into spreadsheets to do modeling.