Self-Service Knowledge for Everyone

Having the right piece of knowledge at the right time is pure gold in business. I rarely speak with a commercial Jaspersoft customer without hearing a fascinating anecdote about how they are using our BI tools to make new insight emerge quickly and affordably within their organization. Of course, this is what we are in business to provide.

The Jaspersoft Community is no different. Consequently, our open source customers need information and insight to get the most out of their experience with our projects and products. For nearly two years, we’ve talked internally about how to deliver more comprehensive knowledge to this community that is more consistent with the knowledge we’re able to deliver to commercial customers, but in a scalable, virtual manner. With the launch and availability of Self-Service Express, we’re now able to begin delivering on this goal.

Jaspersoft serves a big community. Our latest stats show more than:

• 14 million downloads of our product (lifetime),
• 230,000 registered community members,
• 175,000 production deployments of our tools, and
• 14,000 commercial customers across the globe.

This spring, we surveyed our community to learn more about its appetite for more formal, professional knowledge about Jaspersoft community products. The responses were consistent with our intuition. More than 80% of respondents declared interest in having access to better technical knowledge, even for a modest fee.

Our Community Advisory Board affirmed this interest, with member Ben Uphoff stating: “Self-Service express will help me and my team become more productive as we build reports and dashboards for our users. The enterprise search capability means we can quickly find what we are looking for and the rich documentation and customer knowledge base provide us with a lot of useful and practical how-to information.”

Self-Service Express is a clever combination of our new enterprise search engine, our fast-growing Knowledge Base, and newly-created access to all of our professional technical documentation (commonly known as “Ultimate Guides” but in a searchable PDF format). The result is this powerful yet inexpensive knowledge service that allows any Jaspersoft customer, community or commercial, to gain fast, accurate technical answers that can help drive more successful BI projects.

This is the first of a series of knowledge services that we’ve envisioned, and we look forward to more community feedback to determine which direction we go from here. Let us know what you think about Self-Service Express. In the meantime, we’ll continue to advance the knowledge components of this first service, driving greater value through insight to all those who use it.

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

A New Community Leader for a New Age!

Congratulations to Matt Geise, who was just named Jaspersoft’s Open Source Community Development leader. Matt’s job is to build, nurture, and enable a thriving Community of open source business intelligence software fanatics. It’s a big job and Matt is just the right person to lead our next generation of work with the Jaspersoft Community.

In his book, “Art of Community”, Jono Bacon declares: “Every software project, online site, or company has to manage the community of interested people surrounding it. The community is the source of new ideas, a reliable support network, and the best marketing tool.” Jono has long been a leader and advocate for successful technical communities and he always has something to say about them. You can follow his updates and thoughts here.

Those like Jono, with experience building, leading and managing technical communities, talk about the skills and methods that make those communities vibrant and healthy while recognizing that they are organic, living things. Communities need organization, leadership, enablement, nurturing, as much as they need autonomy and self-sustenance. Successfully building the community requires all of this and more. So, the chemical make-up of the community leader is vital.

Matt has always been a proud PART OF the Jaspersoft community. First as an operations manager and then as our technical customer support leader, Matt has been on the frontline with our customers and community members every day while at Jaspersoft. He knows what works and what doesn’t and he isn’t easy to please. As a fierce advocate for the community’s needs, Matt will work alongside each of our key project leaders (including Teodor Danciu and Giulio Toffoli, the leaders of JasperReports and iReport/Jaspersoft Studio, respectively). For this advocacy, Matt is already known and well respected.

Maybe most importantly, Matt has a clear but malleable vision for the next generation of Jaspersoft’s community. He will deliver big results for and with the community – because he listens and understands as often as he speaks and declares. Stay tuned for a variety of tools, programs, and projects that help take the Jaspersoft community into a new age. Matt has my thanks and congratulations . . . and he’s just getting started.

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

Finally . . . Reporting for Eclipse!

We’ve been thinking and talking about this since 2006, fundamentally driven by the belief that the Eclipse community deserves best-in-class reporting and unfettered access to a complete BI suite that doesn’t necessarily require a commercial license. To do this right, we always knew that our flagship report design tool (iReport) would need to be re-built using the Eclipse IDE and made available as both an Eclipse plug-in and a stand-alone tool. So, that’s what we’ve done.

Yesterday, we announced Jaspersoft Studio – our new name for the Eclipse-based version of iReport. I hope you’ll want to learn more about it and visit the new project page. This is a complete re-write of iReport using Eclipse. Jaspersoft Studio v1.0 (available now) contains about 90% of the features available in the latest NetBeans version of iReport (v4.0) – and our intention is to (as quickly as possible) make the Eclipse version our primary product, with more advanced features than we’ve been able to deliver before. We’ll continue to advance and support iReport for NetBeans for some time, because this community deserves great reporting and a healthy, vibrant BI suite as well.

Why Eclipse? There are an estimated 9 million Java developers in the world today (according to Oracle) and more than half of them use Eclipse as their IDE most of the time. Although these are just estimates, there is little question about the important role Eclipse plays in Java and software development. This is an area where Jaspersoft, in total, will strive to be a helpful and forceful presence. For example, there is additional value for our BI suite community who can now build their reports and data integration jobs (using Jaspersoft ETL) within the same Eclipse framework, yielding greater simplicity in their design environment.

Finally . . . reporting for Eclipse! With this release, there was celebration at Jaspersoft and a collective exhale as we delivered something that the Jaspersoft community has asked about for some time. Beyond our limited resources and a highly-prioritized roadmap, we have a requirement to maintain high standards that we never want to compromise. So, getting to v1.0 wasn’t easy, but it was important to take the time and to get it right.

My deep thanks and gratitude are extended to the lead Jaspersoft engineers who made this happen: Giulio Toffoli, father of iReport and on-going architect of so much of what we do at Jaspersoft; Teodor Danciu, father of JasperReports our other technical founder/architect and constant collaborator with Giulio on this project; Slavic (Chicu Veaceslav), primary engineer and apprentice working with Giulio; and Yura Bablyukh, lead tester and reviewer. Soon, I’m sure, they’ll have the thanks and gratitude of the Eclipse community as well.

My message to the Eclipse Community: Try Jaspersoft Studio! It’s free, easy and powerful. With it you can do far more with your data than you can with other tools. And tell all your friends. Because we have more planned for you in the future, destined to make you an even more successful BI Builder.

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

The Future of BI Is Now

I’ve spent a meaningful number of days so far this year traveling the globe. Following on from our JasperWorld conference (February, San Francisco) and other events in the United States, I’ve met with customers and spoke at conferences in Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, Germany, Holland, Austria, London and Paris. In all my conversations, what I’m struck by is just how quickly third-generation business intelligence architectures are being embraced and deployed within organizations of all sizes. I find it heartening, even encouraging.

As backdrop and for further reference, I’ve written relatively extensively about the “Future of BI” and related concepts in my TDWI column, called “The BI Revolution.” You can review four specifically-related articles:

1. The BI Revolution: Data Deluge or Opportunity?

2. The BI Revolution: A New Generation of Analytic Applications

3. The BI Revolution: Business Intelligence's Future

4. The BI Revolution: The Rise of the BI Builder

To summarize . . .

These articles describe how the growing volume of data represents real opportunity for those organizations that strategically understand how to exploit it, and that more commonly, many of these organizations are choosing to create their own analytic applications to deliver keen insight affordably to a wide business user audience.

Additionally, the new BI platforms best designed to enable these modern, scalable, and lower-cost uses are built fundamentally differently than their predecessors . . . but one thing that’s common regardless of platform generation is the rise of the real hero in the BI solution equation: the BI Builder. The BI Builder is the technical steward who manages to unite business requirements and data with BI technology, enabling greater success (and more pervasive) use of BI than what’s been typically possible in the past.

My conversations with customers and community members in each of the cities I visited provided welcome testimony that the concepts and practices described in my previous articles are, indeed, being realized. From small government and not-for-profit organizations to global 2000 corporations (and everything in between), I met with BI Builders who are uniting internal and external data and delivering new views of this data to business users who are able to make better, faster, fact-based decisions than ever before. In all these cases, the implementation costs were a small fraction of what they would have been just 5-7 years ago – while the number of users reached in many cases was large and growing, uninhibited by per-seat charges complex user interfaces, and hard-to-maintain installations that commonly stall sizable BI deployments.

The new examples I uncovered make me proud that Jaspersoft is playing an important part in this BI revolution. And they reminded me that the future of BI really is now.

I will be describing several of these customer examples in future posts. In the meantime, I’d be interested in your feedback on my TDWI articles or any of my points here.

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

The Sin in Open Source

I’ve written before about the genuine renaissance open source software represents and the vast implications that openness provides. I admitted that computer science, based on its relative unwillingness to share great ideas, has lagged behind other hard sciences in its understanding of how and where value is created.

I’ve also written about the principles of open source software and how the mere gifting of source code, while important, does not actually generate the majority of value for the community. Instead, the real value comes from adhering to the principles of open source -- transparency, participation and collaboration -- and I’ve tried to evangelize this is the real method upon which open source companies help create success.

In the past year and up until my most recent trip to Europe two weeks ago, I’ve been talking less and less about open source software – both the conceptual model and Jaspersoft’s position as a commercial open source software company. I believe I’ve had less to talk about precisely because my predictions have been realized . . . the open source model is much better understood and open source software is now more mature and acknowledged as sufficiently capable to run even in the most mission-critical environments.

Just this week, analyst Matt Aslett posted a blog about this phenomenon and the decline of open source as an identifying differentiator among top open source companies. His assessment is spot on, and in my opinion, due to the fact that open source is no longer playing defense.

For years, the conversation around open source technologies was about “is it really as reliable, as safe, as powerful and as cheap as they claim?" By and large, these conversations have become a thing of the past, and not only are we “open sourcers” ecstatic about this, it’s also given many OSS companies the time and attention to address more of our key competitive differences beyond being open source.

Recently I’ve been spending more time with open source communities. Through global travels, I’ve met with a wide number of those participating in Jaspersoft’s community as well as community members affiliated with Talend, Acquia, Red Hat (Linux and JBoss), R (the statistical analysis language/tool) and a variety of “Big Data” communities, especially Hadoop. In most of these cases, I was delighted to witness growth and vibrancy, with community members talking proudly of what they’ve done and intend to do with these great open source products.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the amount of “sin” going on in these open source communities. What do I mean? Glad you asked.

Open source communities thrive based on the community members donating either their time and/or money. Donating money typically comes in the form of buying or subscribing to the commercial versions of the open source products. Donating time can come in a wide variety of forms, including providing technical support for one another in forums, reviewing and commenting on projects, helping to QA a release candidate, assisting in localization efforts, and of course contributing code improvements (features, bug fixes and the like).

The sin in open source comes from contributing neither one’s time nor money.

Many of the community members with whom I recently spoke admitted to using only the open source (Community Edition) versions of the software and not contributing back in any recent or relevant way to the community and its projects. That’s the sin. If you are receiving big value through the use of a valuable open source project, great, but know that contributing back to the community is necessary to help ensure that community and open source project will continue to thrive and succeed.

So this is my plea for each community member: Contribute. Participate. Collaborate. Act transparently. In a sense, each member of an open source community should embody the principles of open source. That’s what makes this a renaissance. Your contribution is required.

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

Insight Into Any Data Source

I’ve spent many hours talking to customers who are driven to respond assertively to the manybusiness challenges and opportunities presented to them nowadays. Top on their list is harnessing the deluge of data available to them to make more timely, fact-based decisions, which I’ve written about previously. Their businesses depend upon it. So, I’m proud that today, Jaspersoft is in better position than ever to help its customers rise to this challenge and create new opportunities.

Yesterday, we launch Jaspersoft v4.1. It may be just a single digit improvement from v4.0, but it’s a giant leap toward delivering insight from any data source (and released just four months after Jaspersoft 4!). Utilizing the enormous architectural improvements and the ground-breaking UI framework designed into Jaspersoft 4, we are quickly delivering a simple, elegant new interface to ROLAP-based, multi-dimensional data. And we’ll deliver that interface purely within our natural, web-based, drag-and-drop environment that allows querying of and interaction with nearly any data source. Here’s a sample screen to provide a view of this new ROLAP interface.

In total, our Jaspersoft BI Server architecture now supports integrated analysis capabilities across relational, OLAP and Big Data sources. Which means that our broad array of Big Data connectors can be used to bring gobs of data into this unified analytic and reporting environment, yielding new business insight simply and at an unbelievably low cost. Kind of makes the deluge of data seem tame-able.

Jaspersoft is fortunate in that its product’s breadth of use affords us a front row seat to some of the most demanding reporting and analytic requirements in the world. We know that scalability and performance will become ever-more important as data sizes and expectations for near real-time results grow. Clever then that Jaspersoft v4.1 comes wrapped in a native 64-bit installer, which allows this powerful BI server to be up-and-running on the most powerful hardware with the click of a button. Smells like more timely, fact-based decisions are on the horizon for organizations of any size.

Because this powerful, scalable, integrated analytic BI server still comes with our incredibly affordable commercial open source subscription pricing, we’re doing all we can to eliminate the barriers for anyone to create their own new opportunities.

My only hope is that everyone will check out Jaspersoft v4.1 before they consider using any other BI server. To learn more about our new product, you can check out the updated information on our web site or consider attending an up-coming webinar.

In the meantime, all comments and feedback are encouraged. Let me know what you think.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft

Meet the Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Rock Star Award Winners

This year, Jaspersoft was proud to start a new tradition – an awards program designed to recognize excellence in Jaspersoft implementations by customers and members of our open source community. In our search for the most creative and effective deployments, we found that Jaspersoft BI touches almost every industry sector: Telecommunications, Computer Software and Technology, Higher Education, Financial Services, and many more - as well as almost every region across the globe.

The Jaspersoft BI Rock Star awards, recently announced at JasperWorld 2011 in San Francisco, recognized three of our customers whose BI innovations excelled.

The winners for the inaugural awards were:

· Dave Jarvis- White Magic Software, British Columbia, Canada

· John Kearney- The Commonwealth Medical College, Scranton, Pennsylvania

· George Mehok- Revol Wireless, Independence, Ohio

Dave Jarvis, our Grand Prize winner and principal at White Magic Software, developed a Climate Reports tool with JasperReports, iReport, and the R programming language to display local climate trends. The software has been used by Environment Canada, environmentalists, climatologists, and the general public. The purpose of the software is to give businesses (such as vineyards) that are climate-sensitive in nature the ability to adapt as our climate changes. One of the reasons Dave developed the climate reports tool was to produce an interface that was unique amongst tools offered in the climate/weather industry. By unique Dave means, "usable by the general public."

John Kearney at The Commonwealth Medical College (TCMC) purchased the Jaspersoft BI suite to query data and create reports from a data mart that houses the College’s Administrative Systems Portfolio. TCMC successfully built domain sets across eleven functional units, trained end users, and released the application in a production environment within 3 months of acquiring the Jaspersoft BI suite.

The rollout of the application was a huge success in the College. Units such as the Registrar, Admissions, Financial Aid, Payroll and Faculty Developments now have access to the raw data contained within the source systems for the first time, providing an immediate return on investment of the application. These users became the basis of the TCMC Jaspersoft user group and serve as an alternate means of “how to” within the College rather than needing to rely heavily on the IT department.

George Mehok at Revol Wireless utilized the full Jaspersoft BI suite to create a comprehensive data warehousing and business intelligence platform that provides:

Operational Reporting, Dashboards, Data Exchange and Business Analytics Tools. The most pervasive use of Revol’s Jaspersoft-based BI toolkit is Key Performance Indicator (KPI) reporting and dashboards. Because of the competitive nature of the wireless industry, it is critical that Revol Wireless track their performance at various levels, including company, region, store, and employee. Every report or dashboard includes a KPI to compare performance to targets – and that keeps them all focused on accountability.

Revol Wireless also uses BI analytics to uncover opportunities, validate assumptions and solve problems associated with sales, marketing and customer service performance. For example, they were able to identify ways to make their ecommerce purchasing process more effective using data analytics. The result was a 25-35% improvement in web-based credit card approvals on www.revol.com. That improvement translates into increased sales and ultimately more satisfied customers.

Jaspersoft’s Rock Stars embody the attributes of the new hero in the solution equation, the BI Builder, in order to achieve true BI success. Industry studies show that business Intelligence solutions achieve greater organizational success when information is used for decision-making. Jaspersoft’s flexible architecture, modern design, and cost-effective business model allow the BI Builder to be successful, helping to make BI pervasive within an organization.

We’d like to hear from more BI Builders about how they’re using Jaspersoft tools to make BI more widely deployed and useful. Let the comments begin.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft