Crystal Analysis

Crystal Analysis (a.k.a. Crystal Analysis Professional) is an On Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) application for analysing business data originally developed by Seagate Software.

It was first released under the name Seagate Analysis as a free application written in Java released in 1999. After disappointing application performance, a decision was made to rewrite using ATL COM in C++. The initial rewrite only supported Microsoft Analysis Services, but support for other vendors soon followed, with Holos cubes in version 8.5, Essbase, IBM DB2 and SAP BW following in later releases. The web client was rewritten using an XSLT abstraction layer for the version 9.0 release, with better standards compliance to support Mozilla based browsers—this work also set the building blocks for support for Safari.