Jaspersoft Enhances BI Web Application Integration

Jaspersoft Dashboard

Open source provider Jaspersoft released version 4.0 of its business intelligence (BI) software on Tuesday, which includes customizable architecture for Web applications and look-and-feel enhancements tooled from a consumer perspective.

Jaspersoft 4 is an update to the company's complete BI suite and features a new UI framework that makes the architecture a 100% W3C standards-based Web application stack. The suite can stand alone or live inside another application. Added "themes" allow for the look-and-feel to be tailored to specific users and devices. The full suite includes reporting, dashboards, analysis, data integration, and platform tools.

Though not strictly an SMB vendor -- customers that do more than $1 billion in annual sales account for 30 to 35% of Jaspersoft's revenue -- its open source model often attracts smaller firms with slim budgets for analytics, as an alternative to pricier platforms like those offered by SAP, IBM, and Oracle.

In fact, Jaspersoft's pitch to smaller businesses and their everyday attention to total cost of ownership -- like the plugs of other open source BI vendors -- should have a familiar ring: Save money compared with the larger proprietary providers, deploy quickly, and gain flexibility on a platform that plays nice with your existing infrastructure.

Jaspersoft CEO Brian Gentile said the small and midmarket segment is poised to drive growth in the BI and data management industry, and that his company has worked to position itself and its products to capture its fair share.

"You hear a lot from [SMBs] about consumer-like use and interaction with tools, so that a better and easier experience is delivered," Gentile said. "You hear a lot more about costs being a driver. I think open source business intelligence delivering a significantly lower cost experience is probably one of the major reasons that the mid- and small market is now becoming more and more sophisticated with BI."

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.