Open Source for America: Good for the U.S., Good for the Globe

[This post is a brief detour in the middle of my four-part series on next-generation web application design and is timed for today’s OSA announcement. I will resume the series with my next post.]

Building a more efficient government is everyone’s job.

This week, a broad and diverse coalition of technology industry leaders, academic institutions, associations and communities are coming together to form a unified voice that will promote and amplify the use of open source software within the U.S. Federal Government. Called Open Source for America, Jaspersoft is very pleased to be part of this coalition and I believe its existence is important for at least three reasons.

1. Helping the U.S. Federal Government to be more efficient makes sense for every citizen. Promoting the use of open source software as a means to do so is a no-brainer.

2. Many of the standards and methods put forth by the U.S. Federal Government influence the technology adoption plans in private enterprise. With its incredibly broad footprint and profile, the U.S. Government will be helping a big section of nearby industries adopt open source and become more efficient (as a result) as well.

3. More aggressive adoption and use of open source software will place the U.S. Government on par with the governments of other leading nations in its drive to use open source software for the benefit of its citizens. Taking a leadership position on this world stage is important for the United States, where much of the world’s open source software is collaboratively developed.

Each quarter, more of Jaspersoft’s community and commercial success is coming from the U.S. Federal Government. We’ve talked publicly about our work with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the various branches of the Department of Defense, and the National Institute of Health. These diverse organizations have found remarkably common reasons to choose open source business intelligence from Jaspersoft: our modern and flexible architecture, lowest possible cost of ownership and a substantial community on which they can rely for constant interaction. These are the same substantial advantages that every Government organization should be taking advantage of. And, as a taxpayer, I would say the sooner the better.

I’ve energetically endorsed an open source technology agenda during the course of the Presidential campaign and was among the first signatures on the Open Source “open letter” to President Obama shortly after he was sworn in, promoting that document in this blog and elsewhere. Open Source for America represents the next logical step forward in helping our Government demonstrate some of the most storied and valuable principles of open source: transparency and collaboration. Let us hear about your support for this coalition by following the OSA on Twitter and sending an email to me at bgentile@jaspersoft.com with your ideas for how the U.S. Government should use open source software to better build our democracy.

Part II: Next-Generation Web Applications Require Elegant Presentation

Leveraging the power of the latest web technologies to “wow” the user

If you’re old enough to have used an IBM 3270 “green screen” or even MS-DOS at some point in your career, you know the exact opposite of elegant presentation. While enterprise software evolved from inconsistency and poor design through to client/server architectures and ultimately the web as a central design point, many things have changed, but one hasn’t: the end user cares immensely about elegant presentation. And, by “presentation” I mean the design, look and feel and the interaction model provided within the application.

Recently, I’ve been researching model Web 2.0 applications – looking for inspiration. I am positively impressed but still wanting a future full of even more capable and elegant, web-based products. As a resource, I’ve found Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 Blog very helpful. He emphasizes that the web community gets smarter with every product release because it has become so organic, when he says:

“Not only do we have examples of great online applications and systems to point to and use for best practices, but the latest tools, frameworks, development platforms, APIs, widgets, and so on, which are largely developed today in the form of open source over the Internet, tend to accumulate many of these new best practices.”

Specifically, Hinchcliffe cites “clean, compelling application design” as among the most important attributes of a Web 2.0 application. For fun, some of the latest trends in web application design are published by Smashing Magazine. The primary point is that “attractive applications inherently attract new customers to try them and is a pre-requisite to good usability and user experience.”

I’ll provide an example of elegant presentation (below), taken once again from my favorite Web 2.0 application – JasperServer.



Our goal has always been simple, intuitive behavior, so the product doesn’t get in the way of the user exploring the data (which is the real star of the show in a BI application). While we (at Jaspersoft) can cite a wide number of things we plan to improve in our design and interaction model, we shouldn’t forget that our current product, based entirely on Web 2.0 techniques and technologies, makes use of many state-of-the-art features and is designed to deliver a great user experience.

I’ll use this screen shot again and others in my next post as I continue to discuss the requirements for successful next-generation web applications. Stay tuned for my personal favorite: “End-User Customization."

Part I: Next-Generation Web Applications Require Ubiquitous Access

If you think Google created Android because it wants to compete in the mobile phone market, think again.

Delivering rich, interactive content to you, consistently, whether you’re using a desktop computer or wireless mobile phone is Google’s agenda. With great influence on the mobile device’s operating environment (á la Android), Google can more specifically control the information served to those devices. Ideally for Google, there would be precious few moments of your waking life when you’re not interacting with some Google service.

Fundamentally, anyone building a new web application should understand that constant and consistent access to the same systems and data, from every computing device, is a top design goal. More distributed workforces combined with more time working remotely and traveling, and the ever-expanding workday requires that knowledge workers today not only be in touch, but be online. If your application and data access experience is compromised because of the computing device, the application service wasn’t designed properly, period.

As example, I’ll use the web application I know best – JasperServer, which (shown below) is delivering access to an executive dashboard through two leading smart phones.

It doesn’t matter that the display device is a smart phone or PDA, because the executive dashboard looks and behaves similarly to its desktop counterpart. Why? Because the application relies on open standard, server-side technologies that operate uniformly within a full-featured web browser. And, it shouldn’t matter where that browser is running because even mobile web browsers are supporting advanced web technologies, like AJAX and Flash. So, designing and delivering for ubiquitous access should be the new norm. Fortunately, open standards (and open source) are largely driving this technological convergence. Good thing as these handhelds now pack the processing power of a full personal computer and users will expect their applications to work properly regardless of the device at the end of the bitstream.

Delivering ubiquitous application and data access for enterprise workers is just the first of four technical requirements of next-generation web applications. Next post, I’ll explore the second topic in my four-part series: “Elegant Presentation”.

A New Blog Series: Next-Generation Web Applications

With Google Wave, the venerable web company is charting the course of new web-based application design, this time in the area of collaboration. If you ever wondered what the intersection of next-generation email, blogging, instant messaging, and wiki-like collaboration might look like all inside a browser, this new open source project is for you. You can watch the entire Google Wave announcement (at the I/O Conference) here.

I see Google Wave as another strident reason why harnessing the power of information, inside an enterprise, will begin to look more and more like the consumer-oriented web. The next-generation knowledge worker won’t struggle with the trade-offs that those of us who grew into computers and the Internet during the course of our careers have had to deal with. And, this transition will occur just in time – as the aging workforce in the world’s most developed economies retires at its fastest pace ever, only to be replaced by younger workers with consumer-like expectations for the way IT systems and applications should behave. You might recall that I’ve referred to this phenomenon in a past post as “The Consumerization of Information”.

In my next four posts, I’ll describe the major web-based application design points that help define the simplicity and usefulness of this next generation of web-based applications. So, to prepare any application project for a much-less bridled future, everyone should deeply understand:

I. Ubiquitous Access to both systems and data

II. Elegant Presentation that leverages the power of the latest web technologies

III. End-user Customization that enables personalized improvements, mash-ups and combinations that appeal to each individual

IV. Integrated Collaboration that helps connect people with information and ideas simply and intuitively.

I’ll use my next four posts to expand on each, in order. And, I’ll look forward to your comments and suggestions to make these four points more powerful and complete. I’ll be looking for ideas on Twitter (follow me at @BrianG_Jasper or @Jaspersoft), as well.

Inviting Community and Commerce

Building the world’s most vibrant BI community is at the core of our every thought at Jaspersoft. I’ve written before about how seriously we take this responsibility and how our investments (time and money) are lined up to support it, from our new JasperForge to our measurement and metric system called the Community Vibrancy Index (CVI). What I’ve not highlighted before is the integral role that exists between our community efforts and our commercial success. Building and maintaining the optimal balance here is critical for Jaspersoft’s open core model to succeed.

Community members provide the experience, time and attention, and passion – that help to make our products better with every release. Commercial customers provide us with fuel (revenue from subscription sales) that enables us to deliver the very best open source business intelligence products possible. While this is a simplification of the intricate roles being played by our community and commercial customers, one of these groups without the other results in a far less capable Jaspersoft. If Jaspersoft were a human body, the community would be our heart and the commercial customers would be our mind. Not a bad metaphor . . . as I transition into how we put that into action.

On the heels of the launch of our new community web site, the JasperForge, we even more recently debuted a new commercial web site: www.jaspersoft.com. While the technology employed in this new commercial site is every bit as impressive as our Forge, what I’m most pleased with is the emerging linkage between the two properties. More and more, our community is becoming our commercial customers. In turn, more and more, our commercial customers are genuinely part of the Jaspersoft community. It only makes sense to create a total web site experience that ensures all visitors (to either site) can get the most out of every click. While we believe it is important to maintain two sites with two different sets of objectives, we also know that inviting both community and commerce is good for the whole body of Jaspersoft. One example: the Jasper Shop landing page is always among the top five most frequently visited pages at Jaspersoft.com. And, the most common referring site to this Jasper Shop page? JasperForge.org.

If you’ve not visited these new sites yet, I invite you to do so. Hopefully you’ll find reasons to visit and participate in both. In the meantime, you can also follow all-things Jaspersoft by joining our FaceBook group and our Twitter feed. Enjoy.

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

SpringSource + Hyperic = Advancement for Open Source

Today’s announcement that SpringSource is acquiring Hyperic is a solid step forward for open source software. Not only will the combination of these company’s products and technologies yield greater advantages for a larger and needing market of developers and IT professionals, but the combined company size will portend additional leadership at a key time in the evolution of open source.

I’ve long-believed that mass and velocity matter when building a business. Mass comes from serving more customers, building a bigger community and ecosystem, and succeeding financially. All of the successes that both SpringSource and Hyperic have demonstrated during the past few years, when combined, will simply create a more mass-ful and influential open source software company that will further validate our shared methodology. Ultimately, adding credibility and maturity to open source software so that more enterprises and organizations will recognize its many advantages will be good for all of us.

So, I congratulate Rod Johnson (CEO, SpringSource) and Javier Soltero (CEO, Hyperic) and invite you to do so as well. We look forward to Jaspersoft’s continued strategic partnership with the combined company. You can learn more about this announcement at the SpringSource web site.