Ask HN: What do you use for external reporting?

I have been evaluating commercial vendors in the BI/Reporting space for the last several weeks and am shocked by the low quality of most offerings. The "megavendors" (according to Gartner) all have bloated products that seem to be the result of multiple acquisitions without proper integration. The interfaces are on par with Lotus Notes with 8-bit graphics, etc.

A number of smaller independent vendors have compelling products that address the business problem of understanding data, but are very weak from a reporting perspective (QlikView, Tableau, SaS Visual Data Discovery, etc). These solutions don't address the external reporting needs of most organizations including things like financial reporting, bank statements, marketing reports, investor relations, etc.

How do you create and distribute data-based reports outside of your organization?

Some of the options that I've looked at include: SSRS, MicroStrategy, Business Objects, Pentaho, and Jasper.