For deeper insights, you may also explore:
Crystal Reports vs Pentaho Reports
step-by-step migration approach
The Reality of Automation
Most automation tools can only handle simple text and tables and fail with charts, subreports, crosstabs, and complex formulas.
Licensing and Compliance Concerns
Crystal Reports is proprietary software. Automated extraction or reverse engineering may violate licensing terms, exposing organizations to compliance risks.
Hidden Costs of Automation
Automation frequently results in broken reports, incorrect outputs, and extensive manual remediation.
About HelicalTech
HelicalTech is a 10+ year-old company specializing and working exclusively in the space of data. Our services cover the full data stack, including Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Data Lakes, ETL, Data Visualization, and GenAI for data-driven applications. Unlike other IT companies who do every kind of IT work, we specialize and work extensively in this space of data only.
In our initial years, we focused heavily on open-source technologies like Pentaho, Jaspersoft, SpagoBI, Talend, Kettle, Spark, etc. Over time, we expanded our expertise to include proprietary and cloud-native platforms such as AWS QuickSight, Tableau, Power BI, AWS Glue, Snowflake, Databricks and others. We’ve delivered solutions to a wide range of clients globally—Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, unicorns, SMEs, and startups.
Some of the notable clients we’ve worked with include: Tata Communication, CA Technologies, Fractal Analytics, Roche, Mutual of America, Unilever Indonesia, TechNip, Bridgeport University, PrimePay, PCNI.org, Pine Labs, and the Governments of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, and Kiribati.
Pentaho Expertise
We have been working on Pentaho since company inception and have been their partner since 2014. We have worked on all versions of Pentaho including community as well as enterprise version. Further, we have also worked on all the components of Pentaho including report designer, various kinds of plugins in Pentaho, community plugins, schema workbench, white labelling, ETL (Kettle, PDI), and much more.
Some of our Pentaho implementations include SyncHR, Canadian Bearings, University of Bridgeport, etc.
As far as reporting migration projects are concerned, we are already doing 8 projects on Crystal Reports to other tools migration. 5 of them are on Jasper Reports, and 3 on Pentaho Reports.
FAQs
Q: Can Crystal Reports migration be fully automated?
No. Automation is limited and unreliable for complex reports.
Q: Are automated tools legally safe?
Many raise licensing and compliance concerns.
Q: What approach is safer?
A hybrid approach combining automation and expert-led migration.