A layered architecture for communication of reporting system reports to users connecting via a web server. Users communicate via HTTP with web servers without download of plugins or executable files to the user system. The web servers are clustered to balance requests and transmit the requests. The web servers pass report requests via XML to the business intelligence servers to perform the work with the databases. The business intelligence servers convert reports into XML and provide the XML-based version to the web server. The web server then transmits an HTML or DHTML report back to the client over the web.