Major Lawson competitor SAP has just announced that is is buying Business Objects : SAP to buy Business Objects for $6.78 billion

That means that the core of LBI reporting, Crystal Reports, will be owned by one of Lawson's competitors. That may cut the legs off of LBI reporting, if SAP figures out how to screw Lawson's setup.

Of course, another Lawson competitor is alreasdy heavily invested in the database end of Lawson installations -- Oracle. So we'll have to see how this new wrinkle turns out. :nix:

Interesting news, for sure. I think it's way too early and a huge stretch to suggest that this will eventually render LBI obsolete. Reporting Services does use a BO component, Crystal Embedded (aka RAS), which is basically the report engine. However there is a lot more to Reporting Services (and LBI for that matter) than just RAS. It will be interesting to see how it plays out though...