Using External Reporting Tools
Many Aprimo customers leverage external reporting tools such as Crystal Reports, Business Objects, Power BI, Tableau, SSRS, and Cognos to report on Aprimo data.
There are two approaches to leveraging external reporting tools.
The Reporting API exposes the data that is in an Aprimo Report via a web service which can be consumed by external reporting tools. Some tools may be connected to the Reporting API (for example, Crystal Reports and Power BI), however, other tools may require some data transformation via an adapter (not provided by Aprimo) before being able to be consumed (for example, Tableau requires data to be set up via a Tableau web data connector leveraging a Tableau javascript library before it can be consumed by Tableau Desktop). For more details, navigate to the Reporting API articles.
Report Distribution lets you set up a schedule to export the data from Aprimo Reports on a regular basis to an SFTP site. You may pick up the data files from the SFTP site, load them into a database or data warehouse you own, and report off that database or data warehouse. This is especially useful when you need to combine data that lives in Aprimo with data from other sources.