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Jaspersoft Advanced Reporting

Gentile added that increased technical know-how -- even in organizations where all things tech are a one-person show -- is helping propel BI advances at smaller firms.

"That one person, now with the right tools -- especially the low-cost tools -- can get quite a lot done," Gentile said.

Itself a smaller company with approximately 140 employees globally, Jaspersoft shares a common characteristic of its brethren: A single person handles IT, a "data jock" rather than someone with an IT-specific background, who constructed a data warehouse using all open-source components -- "of course, using Jaspersoft as the BI tool in front of all that," said Gentile.

Jaspersoft touts itself as the world's most widely deployed BI software worldwide, with 12.5 million downloads of its core products and 160,000 production deployments.

"That's because of the open source model," said Gentile. "I'm not going to deny that the open source method has worked very well for us."

The software maker has more than 13,500 commercial customers and is adding "hundreds" every quarter, though that number includes any client that has spent money, from support contracts to training courses. Jaspersoft has signed up roughly 1,000 organizations on subscription-based software model, "which is the real growth engine for us," said Gentile.

There has been an uptick in Jaspersoft's enterprise sales in the last 18 months or so, according to Gentile, but even that might driven by motivations that have long stoked SMBs.

"Departments inside of enterprises are now behaving more and more like that -- like a small to midsize business -- and they're making more autonomous decisions about tools, like for BI," he said.

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