Advancing Mobile Business Intelligence

I read on Twitter recently that talking about “mobile BI” will soon sound silly. We don’t talk about “mobile email” or “mobile calendaring”, so why should our access to critical data through reports and analytic views be any different? It shouldn’t.

The traditional BI vendors have recently put much energy into delivering mobile access techniques in their enterprise software offerings, creating an array of applications for the most popular devices. Their logic is to provide for a majority of the expected end-user features (reports, analytic views, etc.) on a mobile device but optimized for the reduced screen real estate. That sounds sufficient, right? Wrong.

Today, Jaspersoft makes available mobile BI access for the new IT world, along with a new version of our BI platform, v4.2. This new platform version delivers an array of improvements, including one of the most usable advanced filtering feature sets for ad hoc reporting and analysis that I’ve ever seen as well as support for a variety of new platforms (from app servers to databases and more). But, this release is all about mobile access – and herein lies the distinction between Jaspersoft’s approach to mobile BI and that of its traditional competitors.

Jaspersoft v4.2 delivers the BI industry’s first mobile SDK for creating native iOS (iPhone or iPad) applications. This SDK includes a sample iPhone app to enable a BI Builder to create a customized mobile application from an advanced starting point. Version 4.2 also includes elegant, fully-featured iPad enhancements that deliver a rich, browser-based experience for users of the world’s most popular tablet computer. Why did we provide mobile client capabilities in both native and browser-based formats?

Go Native

If we’ve learned anything after 8 years as a commercial open source company, it’s that our community and customers are incredibly clever and creative (BI Builders, every one of them). We know that trying to accurately predict everything that a modern BI user will want to do with a mobile computing device is not possible. By providing an iOS SDK and sample application to vastly simplify the job of creating native, custom mobile applications, we arm our customers with the tools and techniques to truly deliver a properly featured mobile app that solves their users’ needs. We expect this native approach to appeal especially to those who embed BI into other applications. Our native mobile client approach allows those embedded developers to extend and customize the feature set to suit the unique needs of their end users. Isn’t that what this new, mobile, cloud computing IT world is all about?

Simple & Consistent is Better

Because the iPad provides a lot more screen real estate than an iPhone, this device is well-served by some special browser enhancements that work exactly the way an iPad user expects. Which means multi-touch, gesture-based interaction with the full feature set of JasperReports Server entirely through a web browser. Report and dashboard creation as well as viewing and editing. Full access to the report repository (when granted by the Administrator) and multidimensional analysis for on-the-fly data exploration. All this functionality is made available simply by adhering to pure, web-based design principles. This simple, consistent method of accessing the Jaspersoft server enables the BI Builder to shine as the real hero, better satisfying the needs of the business users that require iPad tablet access to their critical data.

Mobile BI shouldn’t be different and separate. It should be normal, simple, consistent and delivered in a way that delights the user. Importantly, for mobile BI to be broadly used, it must conform to the application area of which it is part – which will likely require some integration and customization. Though the traditional BI providers have quickly delivered mobile client software, we all remember that the first email offerings weren’t the best. So Jaspersoft is pleased to extend the thinking and the model to help take mobile business intelligence to the next level.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft

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