TIBCO Analytics - One Year Later

The past twelve months have been a wild ride in the world of business intelligence and big data, full of acquisitions (including Jaspersoft’s addition to the TIBCO Software family) and innovations. Since forming TIBCO Analytics, we’ve entered an extraordinarily important time for the business and all those customers who’ve placed their trust in us as their partner for data analysis and reporting.   Because of this trust placed in us, and the innovative tools at our disposal as part of TIBCO Software, we have a unique opportunity to deliver best-in-class value with each of our tools.

TIBCO Analytics brings together two market-leading platforms:  TIBCO Spotfire, the award-winning platform for data discovery, analysis and visualization, and TIBCO Jaspersoft, the award-winning platform for embeddable reporting and analysis.  These two platforms solve very different analytics problems and for different types of customers.  Even the very fundamental aspects of these two platforms and the uses for which they are best suited are complementary, which becomes a growing point of emphasis as we aim to deliver increased value for our customers with each product release.

Through the combination of these products and formation of a business unit focused exclusively on Analytics, we have become one of the largest business intelligence tool providers in the industry, and boast one of the largest customer bases as well.  Our significant level of investment in Analytics allows us to solve some of the most important, new analytics problems facing our customers.

We’ll solve these problems through the continued improvement and innovation of both primary platforms (Spotfire and Jaspersoft), and we’ll do so in ways that leverage the strengths of one platform to help the other become more powerful in solving the needs of its core customer.  In other words, we’ll use Jaspersoft-centric features and techniques to help make Spotfire an even more capable data discovery and visualization tool, thereby affordably reaching the broadest possible audience of users, driving greater value in a customer’s investment.

In addition, we’ll use Spotfire-centric features and techniques to help make Jaspersoft an even more capable embedded reporting and analysis tool, enabling more powerful and visual use of data, which also drives greater value in a customer’s investment.

Our longer-term strategy for our Analytics platforms centers on cloud architecture and cloud-based delivery.  Our aim is to literally re-imagine business analytics – the way it is designed, developed, delivered, deployed and consumed – to create a seamless spectrum of web-based analytic services, which can enable anyone to have a personalized or tailored experience that is perfectly fit-for-purpose. It’s an exciting vision and, when we discuss this directly and in more detail with our customers, it never fails to capture their excitement as well.

I look forward to this TIBCO Analytics team describing this vision in more detail for you and then gaining your feedback and engagement so you might join us on this amazing step in the journey toward next-generation data analytics.

Government embrace of open source: the times they are a changin’

Substantial advancements are underway proving that open source software, at every level of the stack, is becoming mainstream in the U.S. Federal Government. Speaking at this week’s GOSCON Conference in Washington, the acting DoD CIO, David Wennergren, spoke about the new departmental understanding that open source software which manifests in commercial form is legitimate and should be considered for use.

I’m religious about efficiency and effectiveness in government, believing that strong democracies are built and reinforced through successful capitalism, which (in turn) is hindered when government is allowed to become bloated and expensive. In this sense, the government’s use of open source is necessary.

Further, I’ve previously emphasized how the government’s use of open source can act as a lighthouse of credibility that influences not only all of the public sector but spills into the private sector as well. I highlighted this while praising the choice of Vivek Kundra as the new Federal CIO and now have more first-hand evidence as I’ve spent even more time with government-focused partners and customers.

At Jaspersoft, we’re betting with our time and energy as we’ve enthusiastically joined both Open Source for America and, most recently, the Open Source Software Institute. Our belief is that profound change will come to the public sector partially due to new efficiency brought by technology.

I’m proud that Jaspersoft is at the heart of a new Business Process Management-driven BI application, developed by HandySoft, that delivers sophisticated business intelligence for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. This is a system that saves time and delivers vital intelligence information to a large audience simply and powerfully, winning Gartner’s 2009 Innovation Award in the process. NRC adds to our already impressive roster of Government customers like NASA, the DoD, and NIH, giving us all hope that fewer tax dollars are being spent to deliver superior analysis and insight, and ultimately better decisions.

I invite you to follow Jaspersoft’s progress in helping to create more efficient government, at our new government-focused web page. This is our part in the return to a government of the people, by the people, and for the people . . . also known as “community”, which is what open source is all about.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft

The Open Source Renaissance

Note: This blog post also appears as a guest post on the blog at my alma mater, Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona. But I also wanted to share it with readers here.

It occurred to me recently that the open source movement is really nothing less than a renaissance. Perhaps that sounds grandiose, but stay with me.

If you think about it, for a few hundred years, some of the most significant advancements by mankind have come from, and are maintained in, proprietary (closed source) methodologies.

Take, for example, U.S. patent and copyright protection laws and policies. They reinforce proprietary, “closed source” rights and policies. As a result of this system, many substantial U.S. companies have formed around breakthrough ideas, but incentives are in place for those companies to guard and protect their intellectual property, even if others outside the company could extend or advance it more rapidly.

Now, to be clear, patent and copyright protection is necessary because it properly encourages the origination of ideas through the notion of ownership. But, too few people consider the upside of allowing others to share in the use of their patents and copyrights, because they think such distribution will dilute their value - when, in fact, sharing can substantially enhance the value. Fundamentally, “open source” is about the sharing of ideas big and small and the modern renaissance represents newfound understanding that sharing creates new value.

In many areas of science, the sharing of ideas (even patents and copyrights) has long been commonplace. The world’s best and brightest physicists, astronomers, geologists, and medical researchers share their discoveries every day. Without that sharing, the advancement of their ideas would be limited to just what they themselves could conjure. By sharing their ideas through published papers, symposiums, and so on, they open up many possibilities for improvements and applications that the originator would have never considered. Of course, the internet has provided an incredible communication platform for all those who wish to collaborate freely and avidly and is, arguably, the foundation for this renaissance.

That’s why it’s ironic that one of the laggard scientific disciplines to embrace open source is computer science. For the past 40 years, for example, incentives have been strong for a company to originate an idea for great software, immediately file a patent and/or register to copyright it, and then guard it religiously. No one would have thought that exposing the inner-workings of a complex and valuable software system so that others might both understand and extend it would be beneficial. Today, however, there are countless examples where openness pays off in many ways. So, why has computer science and software lagged in the open source renaissance?

That computer science is an open source laggard is ironic because the barriers to entry in the software industry are relatively low, compared to other sciences. One might think that low entry barriers would reduce the risk to and promote the sharing of ideas. But, instead, software developers (and companies) have spent most of the last 40 years erecting other barriers, based on intellectual capital and copyright ownership - which is perplexing because it so limits the advancement of the software product. But, such behavior does fit within the historical understanding of business building (i.e., protecting land, labor and capital).

Another relative laggard area - and an interesting comparison - is pharmaceuticals and drug discovery. When I talk with colleagues about this barrier-irony phenomenon, this is the most common other science cited (i.e., another science discipline that has preferred not to share). But, in drug discovery the incentives not to share are substantial because the need to recover the enormous research costs through the ownership of blockbuster drugs is extremely high. In fact, because the barriers to enter the pharmaceuticals industry are quite high, one might think that would promote openness and the sharing of ideas, given that few others would genuinely be able to exploit them. But, once again, the drive to create a business using historically consistent methods has limited the pharmaceuticals industry to closed practices.

So, returning to computer science and software, maybe the reasons for not sharing are based on the complexity of collaboration? That is, it’s hard to figure out someone else’s software code, unless it’s been written with sharing fundamentally in mind. Or maybe there’s a sense that software is art, and I want to protect my creative work - more like poetry than DNA mapping.

Either way, the renaissance is coming for the software industry. Software will advance and solve new problems more quickly through openness and sharing. In this sense, computer science has much to learn from the other areas of science where open collaboration has been so successful for so long.

Fortunately, the world of software is agile and adept. According to research by Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle at SAP Research Labs, during the past five years the number of open source software projects and the number of lines of open source software code have increased exponentially. The principles that this new breed of open source software have forged are already leaving an indelible mark on the industry. Soon, its proponents believe, all software companies will embrace these fundamental open source principles: collaboration, transparency and participation. The course of this renaissance will be our guide.

I would be interested in your feedback on these ideas because the open source renaissance is well underway and I plan to be a model historian.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft

JasperReports v3.6: More Advanced Visualization for More Advanced Reporting Uses

I don’t often discuss Jaspersoft’s specific products in this blog, preferring to offer ideas and insights on the trends that are shaping the world of business intelligence. Today, though, I want to highlight the fact that we’ve launched a substantial new version of our flagship reporting tool that raises the bar in the world of reporting and advanced visualization: JasperReports Professional v3.6.

This new reporting engine, library and professional development environment (which includes iReport v3.6) includes new Flash-based geo-visualization and advanced charting capabilities. In fact, we’re including hundreds of advanced, 3-D graphs, maps and widgets to dramatically improve our customer’s data visualization experience. And we’ve tightly integrated this technology with the JasperReports engine and the iReport development environment to make a great total developer experience.

We’re very excited to deliver this advanced visualization technology for this important audience and market. As I commonly explain, our strategy is to deliver simple, powerful BI tools that are used by and considered useful for the widest possible audience. This release brings us closer to that goal.

I hope all of those developers who love JasperReports and iReport will check out our new product.

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

JasperForge Drives New Levels of Collaboration

Today’s announcement that Jaspersoft has taken to full production its newest JasperForge community web site is much more important to open source than the amount of likely fanfare it will generate.

When we originally envisioned a new Forge platform that would enable the types of collaboration and networking required for the most advanced community development, this new Forge is what we had in mind. Our earlier JasperForge release, the first one built on the EssentiaESP platform, was launched last summer and we termed it a “production beta.” We did so for a variety of reasons, mostly to indicate that we had a large number of things with which we were not yet finished and that we were embarking on an important process that would result in what we see today.

Our new release is termed “full production” because it is equipped with all of the social networking, sharing and engagement features we envisioned last summer. Now we have a full-fledged community development platform that can enable new types of interaction, project-building and even elements of social networking that will simply help community members be more productive, more quickly.

Open source software communities don’t look like they did five short years ago. Since open source started being widely adopted, new types of community contributors have gotten involved in defining features and requirements. Software developers, business partners and resellers all play critical roles in Jaspersoft’s product development. And, because we host the world’s largest open source BI community, we believe it is our natural responsibility to take a leadership role in defining the next-generation of Forges, or community collaboration environments, to meet these evolving demographics.

If you’ve not yet experienced the new JasperForge, I encourage you to do so. You will find new features such as Google Gadgets, RSS support, and Wiki and blog improvements, among many other new features. As always, your comments, feedback, and ideas will directly feed our pipeline of improvements planned in the future. So, register and let us know what you think. Enjoy!

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

Open Source BI Can Do Better

Is the real advantage of open source simply lowering the costs of buying and using complex software . . . sort of, commoditization on an enterprise scale? Or, should open source software stand for something much more – such as innovation based on both a truly modern architecture and collaborative development methodology? I say yes.

One of my most often-repeated phrases, inside of Jaspersoft, is “if all we do is replicate the capabilities of the aged, proprietary BI vendors of the past, we will create some value but not enough. Jaspersoft is about innovation and doing things much better, much differently. Our mission is to reach more organizations and individuals with our business intelligence tools than any company that has preceded us.” And, I mean it.

Which is why I am so proud of our Jaspersoft v3.5 release, announced just last week at the Solutions Linux event in Paris. I spoke with Sean Michael Kerner at InternetNews about this new product release and he captured some of the most important points. In summary, Jaspersoft v3.5 introduces three new and substantial elements of functionality that distinguish our product from all other business intelligence platforms:

1. Integrated Analysis - multi-dimensional capabilities delivered within a report or dashboard, without the need for an OLAP cube or data warehouse. If desired, the customer can choose to process query requests against an in-memory data set (within JasperServer). If the customer prefers greater performance, the query processing can be pushed down to the database. This choice is configured with a check box. Pretty cool.
2. SaaS-Enabling BI Platform Architecture - multi-tenancy is built in to v3.5. An OEM customer can now use our BI platform to embed BI functionality within their SaaS application. We already have about 50 commercial SaaS customers using previous versions of our product. We've learned a lot from them and delivered this formal, groundbreaking functionality within v3.5. Our plan to expand SaaS capabilities in future releases will continue to distinguish our platform and set the standard for BI platform functionality.
3. User and Data Scalability - we've completed a wide series of performance benchmarks with v3.5. This new platform can scale from 250 - 1000 concurrent users - all using a single, quad-core-configured JasperServer, depending on the type of tasks they want to accomplish. We know of no other BI platform that can deliver anywhere near this kind of price / performance. Period.

So, you can continue to expect Jaspersoft to deliver BI tools that solve new reporting and analysis problems for many needing organizations. And, you can continue to expect us to do so at the lowest possible cost. This is a win-win for our customers and an invitation to check out a demonstration of Jaspersoft v3.5.


Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

2009 BI Market Prediction #3: The Besieged CIO

This third prediction follows my last two blog posts, which described BI vendor consolidation and technology shifts as the first two predictions for 2009.

My premise for prediction number three is that the Besieged CIO will come under increasing strategy and cost pressure - and continue to look for capable, low cost alternatives wherever they might exist. I call him or her the besieged CIO because the pressure to continue doing more with less, in this top IT role, never ceases. The CEO is applying constant pressure to drive the company to innovate and create top-line growth. The CIO’s budget, however, isn’t growing proportionately and it is a constant challenge to maintain existing IT systems with what amounts to fewer funds so that more resources can be directed to new technology initiatives (to fuel the CEO’s agenda).

So, what’s a CIO to do? Answer: find capable, lower-cost alternatives in all technology categories. This is where I believe new development and delivery models will become even more popular, which benefits open source and software-as-a-service vendors because, in most cases, the up-front and on-going costs are just lower (especially in the case of open source). This phenomenon will continue to expand the high-growth space of virtualization as well as the latest hype area: cloud computing.

Supporting my prediction, very recent survey work by analyst firm Gartner proves that this will be a tough year for CIOs. Among other findings, Gartner’s research shows expected flat IT budgets, the need to restructure to meet the difficult economic conditions, and an on-going #1 technology priority placed on business intelligence. Gartner states that CIOs expect to “invest in business intelligence applications and information consolidation in order to raise enterprise visibility and transparency, particularly around sales and operational performance. These investments are expected to pay extra dividends by responding to new regulatory and financial reporting requirements.”

Lower cost and simpler-to-use BI solutions that enable widespread use of dashboards, interactive reports, and deeper analytics will be the tonic and salve that enable the besieged CIO to make it through these tough times. I’m proud to know that Jaspersoft will be doing its part by delivering the world’s best (and lowest cost) business intelligence products and services.

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

2009 BI Marketplace Prediction #2: Technology Shifts

My first prediction (previous blog post) explained the continuing effects that major BI vendor consolidation will have in this coming year (and beyond). My premise is that those massive BI vendors with numerous and aged software architectures will have difficulty innovating and, therefore, new BI sub-markets will be forged (pun intended) by the younger, more nimble vendors that satisfy new and unique needs.

The second and related prediction is that key Technology Shifts will be another disadvantage for these proprietary BI behemoths. In the last year, we’ve seen some important new technologies emerge and begin to really influence BI – and I believe these will have an even more significant effect in the coming year. Some examples of these technology shifts include columnar-oriented data warehouse tools, query optimizers, SOA/web services (and overall componentized design), mash-ups, in-memory analytics, integrated search, and the use of rich media services to provide more compelling (web-based) user experiences. For BI tools and software, the question is “which vendors will be able to deliver a more modern, dynamic experience using these new technologies?” And, “How will new customer needs be addressed by harnessing some of these new technologies?” The more dated a product and its architecture, of course, the more difficult it will be for the vendor to deliver new functionality that truly takes advantage of these new technologies and solves new problems for a customer.

Just this month, Gartner published its own list of BI predictions for 2009. Second on its list of five predictions is more distributed (across enterprise business units) funding for BI software and solutions. The problem here, Gartner wrote, is that "business users have lost confidence in the ability of [IT] to deliver the information they need to make decisions." Exactly. And, this lower confidence is made worse by business users seeing simple but compelling BI functionality in new tools that are not yet on the IT standards list. Let’s make 2009 the year that easy-to-use and compelling BI functionality is actually used broadly in an enterprise.

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

BI Market Predictions 2009: Vendor Consolidation

My last post introduced four major BI market trends that, I believe, will create dramatic change in the coming year. This post will examine the first trend of these trends . . . and the one that is arguably the most obvious. During 2007, three major Business Intelligence vendors – Hyperion, Cognos and Business Objects - were acquired by Oracle, IBM, and SAP respectively. After more than a year of letting the dust settle, these mega-companies began describing their newly-rationalized, post-acquisition product roadmaps. Regardless of the quality of those roadmaps, some customers are disappointed for at least one of four reasons:

1. Discontinued products. Customers’ favored products are being discontinued in order to merge multiple products across many categories.
2. Stifled innovation. Behemoths are moving sideways, rationalizing code bases and choosing winners and losers, rather than moving forward.
3. Vendor like-ability. Customers’ BI products have become acquired by a vendor with which, for any number of reasons, they don’t feel they can do business.
4. Complex products with expensive licensing options. This will only get worse – more complex and even pricier - because these largest software providers have to cater to the largest, most sophisticated customers of business intelligence.

We haven’t seen the end of this ripple effect. I contend that, in 2009, the consolidation of these largest BI vendors will continue to frustrate customers and in an even more challenging year than the one we just put behind us. This will, without a doubt, provide more opportunity for smaller, faster, and more modern BI software providers because of the disappointment customers feel across each of the reasons cited. In fact, as 2009 matures, the effects from each of these will fuel growth for those business intelligence software providers who cleverly solve a specific business problem that the largest vendors have forsaken. This confluence of “disruptive innovation” and business intelligence is cited by Steve Miller (of OpenBI) in an article written late last year, entitled “Open Source BI as a Disruptive Technology”. Supporting the need for faster innovation, Steve describes the core disruption coming from commercial open source BI (COSBI) vendors:

“At the heart of the [Commercial Open Source BI]-led disruption is technology innovation, which is occurring on a larger scale and in ways not experienced by the traditional proprietary software market. COSBI leverages a worldwide community of volunteer development talent stewarded by professional R&D teams to create a global innovation engine. This combination is critical to COSBI success because the magnitude of community development effort enables a high trajectory of product improvement, while core vendor-employee R&D teams are free to focus on marketable innovations.”

What do you think? Will these ripples from vendor consolidation play out in ways consistent with my prediction?

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

The BI Marketplace: Four Predictions for 2009

Well, it’s that time of the year when anyone who cares to cast an eye forward has the chance to make predictions for what might happen in the year ahead. Having always been a wanna-be futurist, in my next four blog entries I will describe four important trends that I believe are sure to have a significant effect on the business intelligence sector during 2009.

To be clear, the four major trends that I’ll describe have been underway for a few years . . . in some ways too subtle for easy perception and in other ways very obvious. Either way, I’ll call them my own because, hey, this is my blog.

As a preview, here are the four significant trends that I predict will have an even more pronounced effect starting in 2009.

1. Consolidation of the largest BI vendors will create a ripple effect, providing more opportunity for smaller, faster, and more modern BI software providers.

2. Key technology shifts will create a new landscape of requirements in business intelligence, potentially accentuating the strengths of the more modern providers while hampering the aged, proprietary architectures.

3. The besieged CIO will come under increasing pressure to do more with less and continue to look for capable, low cost alternatives wherever they might exist.

4. Enterprise information systems will require a more consumer-oriented approach to appeal to the younger generation of up-and-coming workers, a concept I call “the consumerization of information”.
   

Hopefully that's enough to whet your appetite. I'll be expanding on each of these (sequentially) during the course of the next few weeks. I look forward to your comment and feedback even as I begin to write about each of these trends in my next four entries.

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

Microsoft, Business Intelligence & the Open Source Software Advantage

This week, Microsoft hosted its annual Business Intelligence conference and the early announcements from this event have been (as expected) fascinating. Most interestingly, Microsoft has introduced new code-named projects designed to support BI on a “massive scale at low TCO” and deliver “managed self-service BI” and “People-ready BI”. I will say, if this were buzzword bingo, Microsoft would have a covered card. So, what does all this mean? At least one analyst has already weighed in and correctly pointed out that Microsoft’s announced projects won’t deliver products with real features for some time (Microsoft itself estimates 2010). And even then, on Microsoft’s behalf, I fear that basing its pervasive BI strategy on the client software underpinnings of Microsoft Office is dubious. We know that the average desktop user consumes about 10% of the feature set of the major Microsoft office products (Word and Excel, particularly). If you’re like me, many of the more sophisticated Office features are surely out-of-reach, unless you commit to attending a course or spend a lot of time reading the documentation. So, adding more business intelligence capabilities to an already-overburdened Excel and expecting this to become used pervasively seems specious, at best. Does the world need more complex desktop office suites? Or, does pervasive BI really require a very different approach? It won’t surprise you to know that I believe the future of business intelligence is about lightweight client software, web 2.0-savvy interfaces throughout, adaptable and modular architectures, and the ability to deliver consistent functionality to any intelligent device (not just those that can run Microsoft Office properly). I’ve written here about these principles before (under the headline of "Web 2.0 and Pervasive BI). And, as sure as I’m writing this, I recognize that the next five years will yield a number of barely predictable advancements, all web-based, to which an agile BI toolset must adapt. How does a proprietary architecture built upon aged, complex designs flex to quickly support such new capabilities? It doesn’t. Market-driven adaptability, based on a modern and flexible architecture, is one of the real (and less talked about) advantages of open source software. It is surely the way we’ve been building Jaspersoft’s BI tools into the disruptive force that is destined to make BI pervasive. Open source software, fundamentally, is about the community’s involvement in the development of software – which helps ensure new capabilities are added quickly and in a way that is consistent with the needs of the market. If a feature or capability is important, the odds that one or more of Jaspersoft’s nearly 90,000 registered community members will want to help is extremely high. How could 90,000 community members advance our products meaningfully without an open, modular, modern architecture that not only allows but promotes such advancement? Imagine a developer outside of Microsoft trying to add a feature to the proprietary code base of Microsoft Office. Now that would require business intelligence.

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

Europe, ETL & High-Performance Data Warehousing

I spent all of last week traveling through Europe – meeting with open source partners and speaking with analysts and press about all-things business intelligence and open source. It was truly “trains, planes, and automobiles”, with a few city buses tossed in for complexity. In total, a very valuable trip, though. As example, I met with John Powell, CEO of Alfresco (www.alfresco.com). We swapped successes and concerns and I was thrilled to learn that, like Jaspersoft, this open source content management leader is doing very well, despite the vex-some global economy (or perhaps because of the vex-some global economy?).

My primary task in travel, though, was to amplify the important announcements that have occurred for Jaspersoft and the world of open source business intelligence . . . no doubt you’ve already stitched together the theme. Just in case, I’ll spell it all out for you here briefly.

First, in mid-August, we debuted a remarkable demonstration of our technology integrated with Infobright’s Brighthouse product - which runs atop MySQL – and provides an optimized, columnar-oriented data warehouse engine. Key to this demonstration is the expertise at OpenBI, one of our most highly-skilled open source BI consulting partners (www.openbi.com). For unmatched scalability and value, this combination of products is truly second-to-none. Check this out at the on-demand webinar section of our web site (http://www.jaspersoft.com/nw_events1.html).

Second, earlier this month, Jaspersoft and Infobright (www.infobright.com) announced a bundle of open source (Community Edition) software to dramatically alter the value delivered in this arena. Specifically, the two companies “today announced plans to deliver a joint end-to-end open source BI and data warehouse solution, available as a JasperForge project. JasperForge.org is the largest open source community portal with hundreds of projects for the Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite. The new joint project bundle will be based on Jaspersoft and several Sun open source products, as well as the new open source data warehouse software, Infobright Community Edition (ICE). This enterprise-class, self-managing solution is a proven alternative to today’s high-cost, high-maintenance data warehouse products.”

So, at this point, the stage seems set . . . and our focus on delivering valuable, scalable open source BI for even sophisticated data warehouse-based projects is obvious. But then, this week, we added even more mettle to this equation by extending our partnership with Talend, the leading commercial open source data integration company.

For nearly two years, Talend (www.talend.com) has been behind our JasperETL product, which enables the simple and quick construction of data warehouses and data marts so that data can be fully utilized by JasperServer and JasperAnalysis.In summary, we announced that we have extended our partnership agreement by developing an entirely new version of the JasperETL solution, designed specifically to include the features most used by Jaspersoft’s BI customers. Powered by Talend, this JasperETL package will combine the elements of Talend Integration Suite that are the most relevant for BI users, and will meet Jaspersoft customers’ requests for an ETL capability that delivers more power and flexibility in their BI deployments. The new version of JasperETL will be offered exclusively from Jaspersoft and will be included in every paid subscription of the Jaspersoft BI suite.

Renewing and extending our agreement with Talend seemed perfectly appropriate under the backdrop of the Paris Capitale du Libre event, which was held this week in Paris. My last post cited the fantastic progress and momentum that open source (and Jaspersoft) is seeing in Europe. So lastly, I’ll simply encourage you to read our press release (dated September 24) to learn more about our customer and community traction in the Euro Zone: http://www.jaspersoft.c om/nw_press_jaspersoft_translates_european_roots.html

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft

Web 2.0 and Pervasive Business Intelligence

A recent online ComputerWorld article is entitled "Can Web 2.0 Save BI?". The article focuses mostly on the mash-up functionality delivered by a Web 2.0-based analytic application and the simplicity it can deliver to even a novice end user. I found this article interesting but narrow in its scope. So, I wondered: "How important are Web 2.0 principles and technologies to the current and near-future state of business intelligence?". I say they provide vital, lifeblood, must-have, without-them-you-perish capabilities. At Jaspersoft, we are completely convicted about defining and delivering the ultimate Web 2.0 experience in business intelligence. Here are three reasons why.

1. Aged BI Architectures That Need to Be Displaced. The large, proprietary BI software vendors have very dated software architectures (in some cases, 20+ years to origin) that will greatly constrain them as they need to transition to more and more truly web-based capabilities. These vendors will have to mostly rely on web services extensions and / or retro-fitting their C/C++ underpinnings to accommodate a web audience with growing consumer-like expectations. So, in addition to the BI consolidation and market opportunity that it presents (for Jaspersoft), these proprietary vendors are leaving a technology gap wide open for new, modern software architectures like what we offer.

2. The Consumerization of Information. For each of the last 2 major releases, Jaspersoft has been busy building-in a growing array of pure thin-client, web-based features that rely on the most modern technologies: AJAX, Dynamic HTML, rich media integration, HTML "frames" for elegantly creating composite dashboards and reports, and the "sideband" dialog that can be orchestrated between browser (client) and server to make sophisticated user interaction more seamless. The result is a user experience that is superior to many desktop applications (because it can draw on the collaborative technologies of the web, like the ability to quickly "mash-up" data, at the presentation layer, from a variety of web sources) and provides the "consumer-like" feel that is now a requirement based on much higher customer expectations. Most importantly, because of our modern approach, we’ll just be able to continue building in features like mash-ups as new technologies and customer requirements emerge.

3. Better Business Intelligence. Lastly, one of the primary reasons all of this is important for Jaspersoft (and its community and customers) isn’t because it provides for a compelling, web-based experience (although it does). It is because these technologies will allow us to do NEW things in BI that our aged, proprietary competitors CANNOT (or cannot with any ease). Here’s just one example: Jaspersoft has been steadily introducing more and more functionality into the most comfortable and common BI construct available: the report. Everyone knows we clearly lead the world of reporting (based on the remarkable popularity of JasperReports and iReport). We are uniquely prepared (and suited) to leverage this broad base of community and customers who rely on us (strategically) for superior reporting and then continue to introduce more and more analytic capabilities within our familiar reporting construct. This combination of analytic features within a simple report will allow everyone to interact with and analyze data much more fully than even interactive reports of the present allow. Delivering simple and sophisticated analytic (OLAP-like) functionality within the reporting environment will allow the average user to:

a) feel comfortable performing analytic chores with data that they would not through a stand-alone OLAP client tool, and

b) not leave his production / application environment for a completely different analytic system (and potentially data store(s)) to "analyze" data . . . in which case new learning must occur and the data sources immediately become suspect.

So, Jaspersoft’s answer to "Web 2.0 Pervasive BI" is to leverage the comfortable environment of the report interface and deliver within deeper, richer (but simple) interactive analytics so that every user can become more capable and informed. Jaspersoft could not provide such rich reporting and analytic functionality without the benefit of the Web 2.0 technologies that define our software. We expect it and so do our community and customers.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft