[This post returns us to my Jaspersoft 3.7 Enterprise Edition features series, after two short posts on important, timely Community matters. To catch you up, my earlier posts on this topic provided an overview of Jaspersoft 3.7 and a dive into its new integrated, in-memory analysis features.]

Many of the most important industry prognosticators cited advanced visualization as a “Top Ten BI Trend in 2010”. Two of my favorite Top Ten lists came from Lyndsay Wise and Nenshad Bardoliwalla. Coincidentally, both ranked advanced visualization seventh on their lists. No surprise, really, as huge growth in data volume, variety and veracity (truthfulness) creates an even more compelling need to discern the critical nuggets from the mountains of seemingly important morsels. What better way to mine information than through rich, interactive visualization techniques?

Jaspersoft 3.7 includes hundreds of Flash-based charts, maps and widgets, many of which are available in 3-D and can be animated. The goal is to provide the report and dashboard developer with richer tools to display information so that increasingly-sophisticated users can interact with and explore information to gain insight more rapidly and accurately.

It’s exciting stuff. Animated 3-D gauges and charts can drive powerful new insights. But the biggest “Aha’ reaction occurs when customers consider using interactive maps that bring the geographic dimension of data to life. So much enterprise data exploration could begin with a geographic component, which enables greater understanding and faster insight, but the data is not placed in the context of an actual map because this type of visualization has traditionally been difficult or unavailable. IT systems management information, consumer packaged goods distribution flow, retail location performance, and financial services customer profitability analysis are all customer conversations I’ve had in the past few months – and which will be improved through the more advanced, interactive visualization capabilities available in Jaspersoft 3.7.

Here’s a screen shot (below) of a Jaspersoft Dashboard displaying Flash-based charts (3D pie and column) and an interactive map. Note that all of these receive commands from a common input control. Note also the mashed-up web content below the graphs, which delivers relevant contextual information for the dashboard user (and which can also receive common input control).

How could you use interactive, animated 3-D charts, maps and widgets to make your data much more useful? To learn more about this and other features of Jaspersoft 3.7, check out our brief demo. I look forward to your comments.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Japersoft

[This post represents another brief break in my Jaspersoft 3.7 Enterprise Edition features series, this time to recognize Jaspersoft reaching some significant community milestones, announced today here]

In January, Jaspersoft surpassed the 10-million download mark – which places Jaspersoft among an elite handful of commercial open source vendors. Even more incredible, we’re not making an operating system, development language or middleware. We develop enterprise-class business intelligence software!

But the most important milestone for us was the number 120,000. That’s how many registered members in our community have now signed up to partner with us in working on more than 350 projects that extend and amplify Jaspersoft’s platforms. Today we have by far the largest total ecosystem in all of business intelligence. More than Cognos. More than Business Objects, and more than Hyperion. This community is incredibly global, with more than 150 countries represented and contributions coming from nearly every corner of the globe.

Today we’re marking this incredible progress with an announcement about the great strides our community has made in helping millions of people around the world solve real business problems with open source business intelligence software.

Jaspersoft recognizes that a growing successful community of interest is also about participation. Everyone pitches in. And, if we’re not creating real value for this great community of people, they’ll move on. That’s why Jaspersoft and the community, to-date have contributed more than one quarter of a million lines of software code each to our wildly popular JasperReports, iReport, JasperServer and JasperAnalysis projects. To put that into a business context, Jaspersoft and its community’s contributions to these projects represent an estimated $9 million engineering investment, according to Ohloh.net.

Most amazingly, we’re proud of the innovation that comes from our community’s use of Jaspersoft’s reporting and analysis software. By our leading and organizing the development of this powerful BI platform, so many others can put it to work in ways we can scarcely envision. For example . . .

Spiral Universe uses JasperReports and iReport to flexibly design and deploy reports for schools. From class attendance records to complete transcripts and even grade cards, this is a great use of our highly precise, sophisticated reporting tools. And, Sinfo One SpA uses JasperServer to integrate reporting and analysis into its ERP software, which provides a simple but powerful way to update an older system and deliver new value to its customers.

My hat’s off to the engaged and energetic community members who, by collaborating and participating, make the complete Jaspersoft experience so much more valuable.

The contributions that Jaspersoft makes to our community and the vibrant community that in turn supports us with their innovation help make us not only a good open source software partner but also a more successful commercial company. Earlier this month, Jaspersoft was awarded a prestigious Intelligent Enterprise Editors’ Choice Award, cited as one of the most important “Companies to Watch” in 2010. One of the several reasons for this recognition is the significant community of developers and practitioners that we’ve fostered. I’m particularly proud of Jaspersoft’s gritty, community roots and want to ensure we remain true to its ideals and this heritage. My thanks to Intelligent Enterprise for recognizing this.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft

[This post represents a brief break in my Jaspersoft 3.7 Enterprise Edition features series to recognize the official announcement of Jaspersoft 3.7 Community release, available today.]

As the leader in open source business intelligence, Jaspersoft shoulders an important responsibility to its open source community. In return for our community’s involvement and contributions, we sponsor and create an incredibly valuable set of BI platform projects and then make them available for all to download and use (mostly under the terms of the GPL). I’m thrilled that our Jaspersoft 3.7 platform is now available in the Community Edition, source code and all, just a few weeks after we released our commercial versions. You can download the Jaspersoft 3.7 Community release here.

I’m particularly proud of this 3.7 release because nearly 5,000 community members downloaded and helped us evaluate, critique, test, and ready it for release. Accordingly, v3.7 includes so many new features and capabilities, a short list of which includes:

• Search-powered report repository, making it easier to find reports and report objects;
• Support for report output types such as open office and the latest Microsoft file format extensions (xlsx and docx);
• New cascading input controls enables smarter, easier-to-use reports;
• New native support for Macintosh OS X;
• Support for XLS as a data source;
• Expanded user management web services; and
• New reporting enhancements such as list component, multi-band for a single report, footer positioning, and sorting for crosstabs.

Our primary job is to make our open source BI platform feature-rich and highly useful for a broad range of customers. If we are successful, many will download and use this freely-available version. To ensure our platform contains the functionality required by a broad BI-using audience, we have gone to some length to involve our Community in its development.

Two of the most helpful possibilities for our community’s involvement are project-based feature-voting and community-based translation (called JasperBabylon). Here is an example of feature voting (for the iReport project), which has been available since last October and allows our community to help us constantly calibrate our product roadmap. JasperBabylon is our community-based translation project for developers to collaboratively develop language packs for the Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite. Based on our community’s involvement, we have many language translations available for each of our core projects (iReport, for example, has about 40 languages available at some level of translation!). These are two of my favorite examples of our community in action. I appreciate this every day.

Take a look at Jaspersoft 3.7 Community Release and let me know what you think. Your comments and feedback are always appreciated.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft

We have been working toward in-memory analysis capabilities, within JasperServer, for a couple of years. With our previous major release, Jaspersoft 3.5, we made an important declaration: in-memory analysis techniques are going to be a very important part of our future product direction. Being an open source BI company means a commitment to innovative technology and value for customers. An in-memory strategy gives customers, both enterprises and ISVs, more options to improve their decision making. So, you’d expect that Jaspersoft 3.7 would meaningfully advance our Server’s in-memory, multi-dimensional analysis capabilities. What you might not expect is just how far it goes.

Firstly, in-memory analysis enables JasperServer to hold the query result data set in memory, complete with sufficient meta-data that enables the user to continue analyzing the data along multi-dimensions, without having to re-issue a new query. And, the user manipulates the results using an enhanced data explorer interface, which is a simple, purely web-based, drag-and-drop environment. So, the outcome is a fast and friendly way to sort, filter, pivot, compare, and drill into data without having to separately design and maintain OLAP cubes or having to use a special front-end tool to interact with those special data sources.

What can be done with Jaspersoft 3.7’s new in-memory analysis? The screen shots below provide an example of a cross-tab report, complete with multiple dimensions being viewed (Locations in the form of States and Cities and Product by Name and Type) and a pie chart that graphs some of the data from this report (sales summary by State). The user can add dimensions and measures just by dragging and dropping and then re-orient or adjust existing dimensions by “pivoting”. This cross-tab report can include summary calculations, calculated fields, sorting and filtering. And, the user can continue clicking on data until he or she reaches the ultimate transaction, should they wish.

JasperServer In-Memory Analysis; Cross-Tab Report & Pie Chart

So what does In-Memory Analysis mean for Jaspersoft customers? Unlike other traditional and in-memory BI vendors, we’re delivering the best of both worlds whereby the system administrator can configure the server to perform processing either against the in-memory data set, or alternatively, push processing down to the underlying data store. The decision on which approach is optimal for a given deployment will depend a lot on the query performance characteristics of the data store. For example, a traditional OLTP or non-relational data store may benefit significantly from in-memory processing, whereas a query optimized analytic data store may provide performance similar to or better than in-memory processing. Combining this flexible architecture with the cost advantages of not using an OLAP server gives customers choice and a BI platform that can grow as their data and analysis requirements do.

This is just a summary of the many in-memory analysis capabilities we’ve included in Jaspersoft 3.7. I invite you to check out some additional information and a demonstration here.

Next post, I’ll describe our quest to provide rich, Flash-based visualization to make every report, dashboard, and web application come to life.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft

It’s worth going into a little more detail today about what the difference is between the product suite news and the new Enterprise package. I’ll briefly provide an overview of the features of each and in the following weeks, I’ll highlight some of the specific bells and whistles (translation: capabilities and screenshots) of the most significant ones.

Jaspersoft 3.7 delivers more than 20 significant new features in total. The top five categories where most of the new features are delivered include:

1. advanced in-memory (multi-dimensional) analysis capabilities;
2. Flash-based visualization (3D, interactive charts, maps and widgets);
3. a new repository search function;
4. online, context-sensitive help; and
5. key certifications for some of the most robust (and cost-effective) analytic data stores (Infobright, Vertica and Greenplum) and a federated query platform (Red Hat’s JBoss Data Services, formerly MetaMatrix).

Then, the Enterprise Edition, the third package (or “Edition”) now available from Jaspersoft, offers features for our enterprise-class customers working on the most complex BI projects. Enterprise Edition includes JasperETL for data integration, JasperAnalysis for complete relational OLAP services, a new audit logging/compliance feature and multi-tenancy capabilities. Administrators gain greater manageability, control and visibility into the Jaspersoft BI platform with these advanced features. This bundle of products and features are exclusively available today in the Enterprise Edition.

My next post will begin my drill into the Jaspersoft 3.7 platform features listed above. I’ll start with the advanced in-memory analysis capabilities. As always, I look forward to your comments, questions and feedback!

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

Today marks an important day in the BI industry: for the first time, CIOs and IT managers can get all of the most powerful BI features in one package at an incredibly affordable price. Of course, such an advancement should be delivered by an open source BI vendor.

Jaspersoft is unveiling two things today: Jaspersoft 3.7, which is our new BI platform release, and Jaspersoft Enterprise Edition, which is a new and complete packaging of our most advanced BI products and features.

Jaspersoft 3.7 includes significant enhancements to major feature areas such as in-memory analysis, Data Warehouse certifications and Flash-based visualization. And the new Enterprise Edition is packaged and priced for customers of any size who are dealing with complex BI challenges and advanced workloads, but are too smart to over-spend on an aged, proprietary BI products.

This product announcement is important because it’s been driven more than ever by our discussions with enterprise-class customers and by community sentiment about the challenges they face. And, I’ve written previously about some of the major industry trends that are now obvious and create a new market reality, including the explosion of data and the new economics of IT. In fact, Roger Burkhardt, CEO of Ingres, and his team have been talking about the new economics of IT as a trend for some time. Here’s what Roger has to say about this Jaspersoft product announcement:

“We are thrilled to see Jaspersoft respond to the demands of their customers by introducing a new powerful Enterprise Edition with advanced BI functionality. At Ingres, we are believers in the democratization of business intelligence as part of a larger trend to embed intelligence and collaboration deep into the organization. Open source software, in particular Ingres Database and Jaspersoft 3.7, provides a far less expensive, faster and easier path to value, even for advanced customer requirements.”

In total, these trends bring the often-sought-after smaller enterprises to our door in increasing numbers. A lot of large enterprises use Jaspersoft today, but we’re seeing small and medium-sized business want our wares for increasingly complex BI projects. Today’s news directly impacts this SME audience by providing advanced BI support at a price and overall investment level that can’t be beat. We call it “enterprise-class BI for organizations of any size”.

Starting tomorrow, I will post a short blog that outlines some of the major new features included in this new product release. Then, I’ll follow that with one post per week through the end of this month, each more fully describing one of the major feature advancements. Follow along and you’ll see why this is an important day for BI.

As always, I welcome your comments.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft

Thanks to Brian for letting me announce our BI Jeopardy contest on his blog.

We’re preparing for a really big 2010 and are kicking it off next week with a significant product announcement. If you’ve been following any of our Twitter feeds (Jaspersoft, Brian Gentile, Mike Boyarski), you know we can barely keep our mouths shut about it.

We wanted to find a way to ignite that same kind of energy this year among our online community of customers, partners, analysts and reporters, and thought what better way to kick it off than to have some good plain fun this month!

Starting today and for the next four weeks, we will be playing BI Jeopardy on our @jaspersoft Twitter feed. Taking a page from Alex Trebek, we will put out an “answer” every Tuesday and Thursday. Each person to reply to Jaspersoft via Twitter using our handle (@jaspersoft) with the correct “question” will be entered into a drawing for an iPod Nano. You can only be entered into the drawing once per answer and question, so that’s two opportunities to be entered per week. The drawing will take place on February 1.

Even better - - you don’t have to necessarily get the “question” right to be entered into the drawing. We will choose one person each day who uses the #jasperBIjeopardy hashtag to enter into the drawing. So hashtag away! And everyone who qualifies for the drawing gets a Jaspersoft t-shirt. Doesn’t get much better ☺

Mike Boyarski
Director of Product Marketing
Jaspersoft

I believe the landscape of open source companies will substantially change in the next year with continued acquisitions, one IPO and some new upstarts becoming high flyers. Some may wonder if a return to a stronger economy will spell softer times for open source software, meaning: will IT organizations and developers return to the sinful spending of the past? I say absolutely not. The benefits of the open source model are too well-aligned with the new needs of IT and developers to be so easily abandoned.

So, the now-legitimate open source model combined with a return to a stronger economy will lead to even better growth and financial results for leading open source companies. In this sense, the strong and well-built open source companies will get stronger: Ingres, Alfresco, SugarCRM, Talend and Jaspersoft, for example, will reach new heights.

And, relative open source newcomers who can substantially disrupt in their sector will make big gains as well. I believe these up-and-comers will gain new and deserved center stage profile.

Lastly, I also believe that some even earlier-stage open source software companies will come on the scene strongly, becoming the new “ones to watch”, starting this year.

The Open Source Center Stage

Watch for these companies to break away, driving real disruption in their sectors.

Acquia – the commercial open source extension of the Drupal project is doing for web content management what Alfresco is already doing in the enterprise content management. Have you heard of a substantial web site being built recently that wasn’t using Drupal? Acquia stands to gain handily from this trend.

Mindtouch – with fierce and varied competition in the wiki collaboration space, it’s clearly a tricky segment to pick a winner. But MindTouch has managed to make huge inroads to serve both open source and commercial communities with its open core business model. And it has differentiated its product with both a service-oriented architecture, key for mashing up content with other systems, and with its friendly GUI designed for business users.

Wavemaker – 2010 just might be the year to crown WaveMaker the “PowerBuilder for the web” (a reference to the most successful client/server 4GL tool of the 1990s). Building and deploying advanced, web-based apps quickly and efficiently is critical to the next-generation internet and Wavemaker just may hold the key.

The Newest Ones to Watch

You may not have heard of these companies yet, but I bet you will in 2010.

BonitaSoft – after years of design and development to provide a commercial open source business process management system, this product won the Open Innovation Award in Paris in 2009.

Lucid Imagination – an enterprise search tool, built on the remarkably popular Lucene engine and financed by notable investors, it’s hard to see where this will go wrong.

zAgile – finally a commercial open source tool that enables collaborative software engineering, this product should expand the market led by CollabNet and many proprietary options (including IBM, Oracle, Borland and Microsoft). Looks like some disruption is coming soon.

In 2010, the open source software landscape will continue to shift and change, but you can count on consistently strong innovation and disruption. Which companies do you think I’ve missed? Who will make a new open source mark in 2010? Your comments are welcome.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft

I can’t do a three-part blog series on 2010 predictions and not include one that attempts to illustrate the impact open source software will continue to have on the IT industry. Over the last decade, we witnessed its emergence and immediate mass adoption, substantially disrupting the economics of IT. Now what?

More surely in 2010, and then for years to come, we will see the principles of open source - transparency, community participation and collaboration - become entrenched in the mainstream tech sector. Beyond just the rhetoric of “community building”, the advantages of truly being part of a more vibrant, organic technology development and utilization process will prove far too important to all software and technology companies. The proven benefits will drive imitation.

So, embracing the principles of open source will become expected in 2010 – and appear in a number of forms. Watch for more open APIs from companies of every stripe in order to extend the reach of their products. Even these open source newbies will use community development models to prompt a collaborative dialog and gain much greater familiarity with those using and extending their software.

Finally and specifically, two major developments will unravel during 2010 that will illustrate the reach of open source principles: the rise of Android-based phones and Google Wave. I wrote about Google Wave in 2009 and stand by my praise. This open set of web services that can synthesize the variety of social and collaborative tools is a shining example of what openness can bring to bear. And, Android will genuinely give Apple’s closed iPhone and Research In Motion’s closed BlackBerry platform some real competition, driving volumes that will earn its place in the mobile device market and help drive the principles of open source into the mainstream at the same time.

I’m sure you have more examples for open source principles to impact the mainstream and I’d like to see your comments.

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

Like many things in tech, the term “collaborative BI” was born far earlier than the reality of the technology that defined it. But now, the social constructs are in place. The rise of the social Internet and the focus on sharing is emerging just as enterprises are beginning to understand that their business problems need to be solved collaboratively.

Google Wave and other web-based technologies will give way to a new level of collaboration across analysis, reports and any variety of other enterprise information that will inform decisions better and faster. This will translate into the realization of “enterprise social computing.” See, for instance, Dion Hinchcliffe’s articles and insight on the enterprise social computing trend.

In 2010, we should see collaborative BI as a strategic, fundamental piece of the BI puzzle that helps organizations get even more return on their software investment. How will you put collaboration and BI to work in 2010?

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft