Archive for the 'Business Intelligence' Category
Friday, October 10th, 2008
Microsoft, Business Intelligence, & the Open Source Software Advantage
Brian Gentile
This week, Microsoft hosted its
annual Business Intelligence conference and the early announcements from this event have been (as expected)
fascinating. Most interestingly, Microsoft has introduced new code-named projects designed to
support BI on a “massive scale at low TCO” and deliver “managed self-service BI”
and “People-ready BI”. I will say, if this were buzzword bingo, Microsoft would have a
covered card. So, what does all this mean?
At least one analyst has already
weighed in and
correctly pointed out that Microsoft’s announced projects won’t deliver products with real
features for some time (Microsoft itself estimates 2010). And even then, on Microsoft’s
behalf, I fear that basing its pervasive BI strategy on the client software underpinnings of Microsoft
Office is dubious. We know that the average desktop user consumes about 10% of the feature set of the
major Microsoft office products (Word and Excel, particularly). If you’re like me, many of the
more sophisticated Office features are surely out-of-reach, unless you commit to attending a course or
spend a lot of time reading the documentation. So, adding more business intelligence capabilities to an
already-overburdened Excel and expecting this to become used pervasively seems specious, at
best.
Does the world need more complex desktop office suites? Or, does pervasive BI really
require a very different approach? It won’t surprise you to know that I believe the future of
business intelligence is about lightweight client software, web 2.0-savvy interfaces throughout,
adaptable and modular architectures, and the ability to deliver consistent functionality to any
intelligent device (not just those that can run Microsoft Office properly). I’ve written
here
about these principles before (under the headline of "Web 2.0 and Pervasive BI). And, as sure
as I’m writing this, I recognize that the next five years will yield a number of barely predictable
advancements, all web-based, to which an agile BI toolset must adapt. How does a proprietary architecture
built upon aged, complex designs flex to quickly support such new capabilities? It
doesn’t. Market-driven adaptability, based on a modern and flexible architecture,
is one of the real (and less talked about) advantages of open source software. It is surely the way
we’ve been building Jaspersoft’s BI tools into the disruptive force that is destined to make
BI pervasive.
Open source software, fundamentally, is about the community’s involvement in the
development of software – which helps ensure new capabilities are added quickly and in a way that
is consistent with the needs of the market. If a feature or capability is important, the odds that
one or more of Jaspersoft’s nearly 90,000 registered community members will want to help is
extremely high. How could 90,000 community members advance our products meaningfully without an
open, modular, modern architecture that not only allows but promotes such advancement? Imagine a
developer outside of Microsoft trying to add a feature to the proprietary code base of Microsoft Office.
Now that would require business intelligence.
Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft
Europe, ETL & High-Performance Data Warehousing
Brian Gentile
I spent all of last week traveling
through Europe – meeting with open source partners and speaking with analysts and press about
all-things business intelligence and open source. It was truly “trains, planes, and
automobiles”, with a few city buses tossed in for complexity. In total, a very valuable trip,
though. As example, I met with John Powell, CEO of Alfresco (www.alfresco.com). We swapped successes and concerns and I was
thrilled to learn that, like Jaspersoft, this open source content management leader is doing very well,
despite the vex-some global economy (or perhaps because of the vex-some global
economy?).
My primary task in travel, though, was
to amplify the important announcements that have occurred for Jaspersoft and the world of open source
business intelligence . . . no doubt you’ve already stitched together the theme. Just in case,
I’ll spell it all out for you here briefly.
First, in mid-August, we debuted a
remarkable demonstration of our technology integrated with Infobright’s Brighthouse product -
which runs atop MySQL – and provides an optimized, columnar-oriented data warehouse
engine. Key to this demonstration is the expertise at OpenBI, one of our most highly-skilled open
source BI consulting partners (www.openbi.com). For
unmatched scalability and value, this combination of products is truly second-to-none. Check
this out at the on-demand webinar section of our web site (http://www.jaspersoft.com/nw_events1.html).
Second, earlier this month, Jaspersoft
and Infobright (www.infobright.com) announced a bundle of open
source (Community Edition) software to dramatically alter the value delivered in this
arena. Specifically, the two companies “today announced plans to deliver a joint end-to-end
open source BI and data warehouse solution, available as a JasperForge project. JasperForge.org is
the largest open source community portal with hundreds of projects for the Jaspersoft Business
Intelligence Suite. The new joint project bundle will be based on Jaspersoft and several Sun open source
products, as well as the new open source data warehouse software, Infobright Community Edition (ICE). This
enterprise-class, self-managing solution is a proven alternative to today’s high-cost,
high-maintenance data warehouse products.”
So, at this point, the stage seems set
. . . and our focus on delivering valuable, scalable open source BI for even sophisticated data
warehouse-based projects is obvious. But then, this week, we added even more mettle to this equation by
extending our partnership with Talend, the leading commercial open source data integration
company.
For nearly two years, Talend (www.talend.com) has been behind our JasperETL product, which enables
the simple and quick construction of data warehouses and data marts so that data can be fully utilized by
JasperServer and JasperAnalysis.In summary, we announced that we have extended our partnership agreement
by developing an entirely new version of the JasperETL solution, designed specifically to include the
features most used by Jaspersoft’s BI customers. Powered by Talend, this JasperETL package
will combine the elements of Talend Integration Suite that are the most relevant for BI users, and will
meet Jaspersoft customers’ requests for an ETL capability that delivers more power and
flexibility in their BI deployments. The new version of JasperETL will be offered exclusively from
Jaspersoft and will be included in every paid subscription of the Jaspersoft BI suite.
Renewing and extending our agreement
with Talend seemed perfectly appropriate under the backdrop of the Paris Capitale du Libre event, which
was held this week in Paris. My last post cited the fantastic progress and momentum that open source
(and Jaspersoft) is seeing in Europe. So lastly, I’ll simply encourage you to read our press
release (dated September 24) to learn more about our customer and community traction in the Euro
Zone: http://www.jaspersoft.c
om/nw_press_jaspersoft_translates_european_roots.html
Brian
Gentile
Chief
Executive Officer
Jaspersoft
Web 2.0 and Pervasive Business Intelligence
Brian Gentile
A recent online ComputerWorld
article is entitled "Can Web 2.0 Save BI?". The article focuses mostly on the mash-up
functionality delivered by a Web 2.0-based analytic application and the simplicity it can deliver to even
a novice end user. I found this article interesting but narrow in its scope. So, I
wondered: "How important are Web 2.0 principles and technologies to the current and
near-future state of business intelligence?". I say they provide vital, lifeblood, must-have,
without-them-you-perish capabilities. At Jaspersoft, we are completely convicted about defining and
delivering the ultimate Web 2.0 experience in business intelligence. Here are three reasons
why.
1. Aged BI Architectures That Need to Be Displaced. The
large, proprietary BI software vendors have very dated software architectures (in some cases, 20+ years
to origin) that will greatly constrain them as they need to transition to more and more truly web-based
capabilities. These vendors will have to mostly rely on web services extensions and / or
retro-fitting their C/C++ underpinnings to accommodate a web audience with growing consumer-like
expectations. So, in addition to the BI consolidation and market opportunity that it presents (for
Jaspersoft), these proprietary vendors are leaving a technology gap wide open for new, modern software
architectures like what we offer.
2. The Consumerization of Information. For each of the last 2
major releases, Jaspersoft has been busy building-in a growing array of pure thin-client, web-based
features that rely on the most modern technologies: AJAX, Dynamic HTML, rich media integration,
HTML "frames" for elegantly creating composite dashboards and reports, and the
"sideband" dialog that can be orchestrated between browser (client) and server to make
sophisticated user interaction more seamless. The result is a user experience that is superior to
many desktop applications (because it can draw on the collaborative technologies of the web, like the
ability to quickly "mash-up" data, at the presentation layer, from a variety of web
sources) and provides the "consumer-like" feel that is now a requirement based on much higher
customer expectations. Most importantly, because of our modern approach, we’ll just be able
to continue building in features like mash-ups as new technologies and customer requirements
emerge.
3. Better Business Intelligence. Lastly, one of the primary
reasons all of this is important for Jaspersoft (and its community and customers) isn’t
because it provides for a compelling, web-based experience (although it does). It is because these
technologies will allow us to do NEW things in BI that our aged, proprietary competitors CANNOT (or
cannot with any ease). Here’s just one example: Jaspersoft has been steadily
introducing more and more functionality into the most comfortable and common BI construct
available: the report. Everyone knows we clearly lead the world of reporting (based on the
remarkable popularity of JasperReports and iReport). We are uniquely prepared (and suited) to
leverage this broad base of community and customers who rely on us (strategically) for superior reporting
and then continue to introduce more and more analytic capabilities within our familiar reporting
construct. This combination of analytic features within a simple report will allow everyone
to interact with and analyze data much more fully than even interactive reports of the present
allow. Delivering simple and sophisticated analytic (OLAP-like) functionality within the
reporting environment will allow the average user to:
a) feel comfortable performing analytic chores with data that they would
not through a stand-alone OLAP client tool, and
b) not leave his production / application environment for a completely
different analytic system (and potentially data store(s)) to "analyze" data . . . in which case
new learning must occur and the data sources immediately become suspect.
So, Jaspersoft’s answer to "Web 2.0 Pervasive BI" is to
leverage the comfortable environment of the report interface and deliver within deeper, richer (but
simple) interactive analytics so that every user can become more capable and informed. Jaspersoft
could not provide such rich reporting and analytic functionality without the benefit of the Web 2.0
technologies that define our software. We expect it and so do our community and
customers.
