Microsoft acquires rendering technology from Forerunner Software

Forerunner Software was offering the next generation, mobile first, enterprise reporting and embedded BI solutions that power modern application environments by providing multiplatform data integration and data presentation capabilities for corporations and ISVs. Microsoft today announced that they have acquired Mobilizer and Report Viewer technology from Forerunner to accelerate their 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.

Microsoft provided the following as the reasons behind this acquisition:

• 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.

Learn more about this announcement here.