Monday, February 22, 2010

It’s About The Community


[This post represents another brief break in my Jaspersoft 3.7 Enterprise Edition features series, this time to recognize Jaspersoft reaching some significant community milestones, announced today.]

In January, Jaspersoft surpassed the 10 million download mark – which places Jaspersoft among an elite handful of commercial open source vendors. Even more incredible, we’re not making an operating system, development language or middleware. We develop enterprise-class business intelligence software!

But the most important milestone for us was the number 120,000. That’s how many registered members in our community have now signed up to partner with us in working on more than 350 projects that extend and amplify Jaspersoft’s platforms. Today we have by far the largest total ecosystem in all of business intelligence. More than Cognos. More than Business Objects. And more than Hyperion. This community is incredibly global, with more than 150 countries represented and contributions coming from nearly every corner of the globe.

Today we’re marking this incredible progress with an announcement about the great strides our community has made in helping millions of people around the world solve real business problems with open source business intelligence software.

Jaspersoft recognizes that a growing successful community of interest is also about participation. Everyone pitches in. And, if we’re not creating real value for this great community of people, they’ll move on. That’s why Jaspersoft and the community, to-date have contributed more than one quarter of a million lines of software code each to our wildly popular JasperReports, iReport, JasperServer and JasperAnalysis projects. To put that into a business context, Jaspersoft and its community’s contributions to these projects represent an estimated $9 million engineering investment, according to Ohloh.net.

Most amazingly, we’re proud of the innovation that comes from our community’s use of Jaspersoft’s reporting and analysis software. By our leading and organizing the development of this powerful BI platform, so many others can put it to work in ways we can scarcely envision. For example . . .

Spiral Universe uses JasperReports and iReport to flexibly design and deploy reports for schools. From class attendance records to complete transcripts and even grade cards, this is a great use of our highly precise, sophisticated reporting tools. And, Sinfo One SpA uses JasperServer to integrate reporting and analysis into its ERP software, which provides a simple but powerful way to update an older system and deliver new value to its customers.

My hat’s off to the engaged and energetic community members who, by collaborating and participating, make the complete Jaspersoft experience so much more valuable.

The contributions that Jaspersoft makes to our community and the vibrant community that in turn supports us with their innovation help make us not only a good open source software partner but also a more successful commercial company. Earlier this month, Jaspersoft was awarded a prestigious Intelligent Enterprise Editors’ Choice Award, cited as one of the most important “Companies to Watch” in 2010. One of the several reasons for this recognition is the significant community of developers and practitioners that we’ve fostered. I’m particularly proud of Jaspersoft’s gritty, community roots and want to ensure we remain true to its ideals and this heritage. My thanks to Intelligent Enterprise for recognizing this.

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Jaspersoft 3.7 Community Release: Next-Generation BI for Everyone

[This post represents a brief break in my Jaspersoft 3.7 Enterprise Edition features series to recognize the official announcement of Jaspersoft 3.7 Community release, available today.]

As the leader in open source business intelligence, Jaspersoft shoulders an important responsibility to its open source community. In return for our community’s involvement and contributions, we sponsor and create an incredibly valuable set of BI platform projects and then make them available for all to download and use (mostly under the terms of the GPL). I’m thrilled that our Jaspersoft 3.7 platform is now available in the Community Edition, source code and all, just a few weeks after we released our commercial versions. You can download the Jaspersoft 3.7 Community release here.


I’m particularly proud of this 3.7 release because nearly 5,000 community members downloaded and helped us evaluate, critique, test, and ready it for release. Accordingly, v3.7 includes so many new features and capabilities, a short list of which includes:

  • Search-powered report repository, making it easier to find reports and report objects;
  • Support for report output types such as open office and the latest Microsoft file format extensions (xlsx and docx);
  • New cascading input controls enables smarter, easier-to-use reports;
  • New native support for Macintosh OS X;
  • Support for XLS as a data source;
  • Expanded user management web services; and
  • New reporting enhancements such as list component, multi-band for a single report, footer positioning, and sorting for crosstabs.

Our primary job is to make our open source BI platform feature-rich and highly useful for a broad range of customers. If we are successful, many will download and use this freely-available version. To ensure our platform contains the functionality required by a broad BI-using audience, we have gone to some length to involve our Community in its development.

Two of the most helpful possibilities for our community’s involvement are project-based feature-voting and community-based translation (called JasperBabylon). Here is an example of feature voting (for the iReport project), which has been available since last October and allows our community to help us constantly calibrate our product roadmap. JasperBabylon is our community-based translation project for developers to collaboratively develop language packs for the Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite. Based on our community’s involvement, we have many language translations available for each of our core projects (iReport, for example, has about 40 languages available at some level of translation!). These are two of my favorite examples of our community in action. I appreciate this every day.

Take a look at Jaspersoft 3.7 Community Release and let me know what you think. Your comments and feedback are always appreciated.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft