Microsoft acquires report rendering technology from Forerunner Software

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We’re pleased to announce that we’ve acquired technology from Forerunner Software to accelerate our investments in Reporting Services. This technology includes, among other things, client-side rendering of Reporting Services (*.rdl) reports, responsive UI widgets for viewing reports, and a JavaScript SDK for integrating reports into other apps – a testament to what our partners can achieve building on our open platform.

This is great news for you, as we see opportunities to apply this technology to multiple points of feedback we’ve heard from you:

  • You’re looking for cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that can run SSRS reports. As you might’ve seen in our Spring ’18 Release Notes, we’re actively working on bringing SSRS reports to the Power BI cloud service, and we’re building on client-side rendering to make that possible.
  • You want to view SSRS reports on your phone, perhaps using the Power BI app. We believe this technology will help us deliver better, more responsive UI for supplying report parameter values, navigating within reports, and possibly even viewing report content.
  • You love the Report Viewer control… but it’s an ASP.NET Web Forms control. You need something you can integrate into your ASP.NET Core/MVC app or non-ASP.NET app. With this technology, we hope to deliver a client-side/JavaScript-based Report Viewer you can integrate into any modern app.

These are large undertakings and we don’t yet have timeframes to share, but stay tuned over the coming months as we always strive to share our progress with you and hear your feedback as early and often as we can.

Forerunner Software will continue to support existing customers for a limited period of time.