Users of SAP's Business Information Warehouse will get additional capabilities for analyzing customer, financial, and supply-chain data under a reseller deal announced last week.

SAP has embedded reporting software from Crystal Decisions in an upcoming release of Business Information Warehouse, the data-warehouse component of the mySAP Business Intelligence system that provides access to data generated by SAP's enterprise applications. About 1,000 companies use Business Information Warehouse, and another 3,000 are in various stages of implementation.

SAP already provides a Web-based query tool, Business Explorer, for querying the data warehouse. But users have been asking for the ability to generate predefined, formatted reports such as those Created by the Crystal Enterprise and Crystal Reports Designer products, SAP says.

Under terms of the seller agreement, Business Information Warehouse customers can generate up to 500 different reports using the embedded technology. Crystal Decisions will provide several thousand predefined reports for analyzing customer data, such as sales opportunities and deal sizes, as well as human-resource, supply-chain, financial, and product life-cycle data. Users who want more than 500 report templates or want to customize their reports must buy a separate license. The reports will help mute criticism that Business Information Warehouse is too SAP-centric because some can incorporate data from other enterprise applications, says Mike Schiff, an analyst at Current Analysis.

SAP and Crystal Decisions are building the reporting capabilities into Business Information Warehouse 3.0a, which is in beta testing and is expected to be generally available in the second quarter of 2002. Pricing for the new release isn't yet available.