Crystal Reports is a business intelligence application used to design and generate reports from a wide range of data sources. Several other applications, such as Microsoft Visual Studio bundle and OEM version of Crystal Reports as a general purpose reporting tool. Crystal Reports become the de facto standard report writer when Microsoft released it with Visual Studio.
The product was originally created by crystal services Inc. as Quik reports when they could not find a suitable commercial report writer for their accounting software. After producing versions 1.0 through 3.0, the company was acquired in 1994 by Seagate Technology. Crystal Services was combined with Holostic Systems to form the information group of Seagate software, which later rebranded as crystal decisions, and produced versions 4.0 through 9.0. Crystal decisions was acquired in December 2003 by business objects, which has so far produced versions 10, 11 and current version 12.
