I’ve spent a meaningful number of days in 2011 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:
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 in many cases the number of users reached 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.
I’ve written before about the genuine renaissance open source software represents and the vast implications that openness provides. I admitted that computer science, based on its relative unwillingness to share great ideas, has lagged behind other hard sciences in its understanding of how and where value is created.
I’ve also written about the principles of open source software and how the mere gifting of source code while important, does not actually generate the majority of value for the community. Instead, the real value comes from adhering to the principles of open source — transparency, participation and collaboration — and I’ve tried to evangelize this is the real method upon which open source companies help create success.
In the past year and up until my most recent trip to Europe two weeks ago, I’ve been talking less and less about open source software - both the conceptual model and Jaspersoft’s position as a commercial open source software company. I believe I’ve had less to talk about precisely because my predictions have been realized . . . the open source model is much better understood and open source software is now more mature and acknowledged as sufficiently capable to run even in the most mission-critical environments.
Just this week, analyst Matt Aslett posted a blog about this phenomenon and the decline of open source as an identifying differentiator among top open source companies. His assessment is spot on, and in my opinion, due to the fact that open source is no longer playing defense.
For years, the conversation around open source technologies was about “is it really as reliable, as safe, as powerful and as cheap as they claim”. By and large, these conversations have become a thing of the past, and not only are we “open sourcers” ecstatic about this, it’s also given many OSS companies the time and attention to address more of our key competitive differences beyond being open source.
Recently I’ve been spending more time with open source communities. Through global travels, I’ve met with a wide number of those participating in Jaspersoft’s community as well as community members affiliated with Talend, Acquia, Red Hat (Linux and JBoss), R (the statistical analysis language/tool) and a variety of “Big Data” communities, especially Hadoop. In most of these cases, I was delighted to witness growth and vibrancy, with community members talking proudly of what they’ve done and intend to do with these great open source products.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the amount of “sin” going on in these open source communities. What do I mean? Glad you asked.
Open source communities thrive based on the community members donating either their time and/or money. Donating money typically comes in the form of buying or subscribing to the commercial versions of the open source products. Donating time can come in a wide variety of forms, including providing technical support for one another in forums, reviewing and commenting on projects, helping to QA a release candidate, assisting in localization efforts, and of course contributing code improvements (features, bug fixes and the like).
The sin in open source comes from contributing neither one’s time nor money.
Many of the community members with whom I recently spoke admitted to using only the open source (Community Edition) versions of the software and not contributing back in any recent or relevant way to the community and its projects. That’s the sin. If you are receiving big value through the use of a valuable open source project, great, but know that contributing back to the community is necessary to help ensure that community and open source project will continue to thrive and succeed.
So this is my plea for each community member: Contribute. Participate. Collaborate. Act transparently. In a sense, each member of an open source community should embody the principles of open source. That’s what makes this a renaissance. Your contribution is required.
I’ve spent many hours talking to customers who are driven to respond assertively to the many business challenges and opportunities presented to them nowadays. Top on their list is harnessing the deluge of data available to them to make more timely, fact-based decisions, which I’ve written about previously. Their businesses depend upon it. So, I’m proud that today, Jaspersoft is in better position than ever to help its customers rise to this challenge and create new opportunities.
Today, we launch Jaspersoft v4.1. It may be just a single digit improvement from v4.0, but it’s a giant leap toward delivering insight from any data source (and released just four months after Jaspersoft 4!). Utilizing the enormous architectural improvements and the ground-breaking UI framework designed into Jaspersoft 4, we are quickly delivering a simple, elegant new interface to ROLAP-based, multi-dimensional data. And we’ll deliver that interface purely within our natural, web-based, drag-and-drop environment that allows querying of and interaction with nearly any data source. Here’s a sample screen to provide a view of this new ROLAP interface.
In total, our Jaspersoft BI Server architecture now supports integrated analysis capabilities across relational, OLAP and Big Data sources. Which means that our broad array of Big Data connectors can be used to bring gobs of data into this unified analytic and reporting environment, yielding new business insight simply and at an unbelievably low cost. Kind of makes the deluge of data seem tame-able.
Jaspersoft is fortunate in that its product’s breadth of use affords us a front row seat to some of the most demanding reporting and analytic requirements in the world. We know that scalability and performance will become ever-more important as data sizes and expectations for near real-time results grow. Clever then that Jaspersoft v4.1 comes wrapped in a native 64-bit installer, which allows this powerful BI server to be up-and-running on the most powerful hardware with the click of a button. Smells like more timely, fact-based decisions are on the horizon for organizations of any size.
Because this powerful, scalable, integrated analytic BI server still comes with our incredibly affordable commercial open source subscription pricing, we’re doing all we can to eliminate the barriers for anyone to create their own new opportunities.
My only hope is that everyone will check out Jaspersoft v4.1 before they consider using any other BI server. To learn more about our new product, you can check out the updated information on our web site or consider attending an up-coming webinar.
In the meantime, all comments and feedback are encouraged. Let me know what you think.
This year, Jaspersoft was proud to start a new tradition - an awards program designed to recognize excellence in Jaspersoft implementations by customers and members of our open source community. In our search for the most creative and effective deployments, we found that Jaspersoft BI touches almost every industry sector: Telecommunications, Computer Software and Technology, Higher Education, Financial Services, and many more - as well as almost every region across the globe.
The Jaspersoft BI Rock Star awards, recently announced at JasperWorld 2011 in San Francisco, recognized three of our customers whose BI innovations excelled.
The winners for the inaugural awards were:
Dave Jarvis- White Magic Software, British Columbia, Canada
John Kearney- The Commonwealth Medical College, Scranton, Pennsylvania
George Mehok- Revol Wireless, Independence, Ohio
Dave Jarvis, our Grand Prize winner and principal at White Magic Software, developed a Climate Reports tool with JasperReports, iReport, and the R programming language to display local climate trends. The software has been used by Environment Canada, environmentalists, climatologists, and the general public. The purpose of the software is to give businesses (such as vineyards) that are climate-sensitive in nature the ability to adapt as our climate changes. One of the reasons Dave developed the climate reports tool was to produce an interface that was unique amongst tools offered in the climate/weather industry. By unique Dave means, “usable by the general public.”
John Kearney atThe Commonwealth Medical College (TCMC) purchased the Jaspersoft BI suite to query data and create reports from a data mart that houses the College’s Administrative Systems Portfolio. TCMC successfully built domain sets across eleven functional units, trained end users, and released the application in a production environment within 3 months of acquiring the Jaspersoft BI suite.
The rollout of the application was a huge success in the College. Units such as the Registrar, Admissions, Financial Aid, Payroll and Faculty Developments now have access to the raw data contained within the source systems for the first time, providing an immediate return on investment of the application. These users became the basis of the TCMC Jaspersoft user group and serve as an alternate means of “how to” within the College rather than needing to rely heavily on the IT department.
George Mehok at Revol Wireless utilized the full Jaspersoft BI suite to create a comprehensive data warehousing and business intelligence platform that provides:
Operational Reporting, Dashboards, Data Exchange and Business Analytics Tools. The most pervasive use of Revol’s Jaspersoft-based BI toolkit is Key Performance Indicator (KPI) reporting and dashboards. Because of the competitive nature of the wireless industry, it is critical that Revol Wireless track their performance at various levels, including company, region, store, and employee. Every report or dashboard includes a KPI to compare performance to targets - and that keeps them all focused on accountability.
Revol Wireless also uses BI analytics to uncover opportunities, validate assumptions and solve problems associated with sales, marketing and customer service performance. For example, they were able to identify ways to make their ecommerce purchasing process more effective using data analytics. The result was a 25-35% improvement in web-based credit card approvals on www.revol.com. That improvement translates into increased sales and ultimately more satisfied customers.
Jaspersoft’s Rock Stars embody the attributes of the new hero in the solution equation, the BI Builder, in order to achieve true BI success. Industry studies show that business Intelligence solutions achieve greater organizational success when information is used for decision-making. Jaspersoft’s flexible architecture, modern design, and cost-effective business model allow the BI Builder to be successful, helping to make BI pervasive within an organization.
We’d like to hear from more BI Builders about how they’re using Jaspersoft tools to make BI more widely deployed and useful. Let the comments begin.
The connected world of the internet has given rise to a new software development paradigm - built on open, web standards and expecting access to resources and services that weren’t previously or formally integrated. Geoffrey Moore projects this trend into the modern organization by simply stating “Tectonic shifts are occurring in today’s enterprise IT environment, which are giving rise to a network-centric stack of software”.
I absolutely agree.
Based on these shifts, the 3rd generation of business intelligence is born, built for the technology, user, and business requirements that define the new world of IT. Fundamentally, these new requirements must satisfy the rapidly emerging needs of cloud-based computing, consumerization of web-based business applications, and lower cost approaches to solving even challenging BI problems. Traditional BI platforms and technologies are poorly suited for this new world because of their complex and inflexible architectures. The customers and uses for which these aged, proprietary BI platforms were designed are already sated.
Enter a new breed of BI platform that is built specifically for this new IT world and you have the context and underpinning for a new class of truly pervasive BI that holds the promise of reaching the 85% of knowledge workers who have been forsaken by traditional BI tools and approaches. I see significant and continued advancement toward this vision during 2011.
In early January, Jaspersoft launched a new version of its BI platform specifically architected for the new IT world and the important, emerging class of user we call the BI Builder. The world needs a next-generation BI platform that expects to be used as an integrated reporting and analysis service. We call it simply Jaspersoft 4.
It is the combination of our modern, open platform with the skills of the BI Builder that will lead the next generation of business intelligence. That’s BI in 2011.
You’re going to want to learn more about this BI future by attending JasperWorld 2011 (San Francisco, February 7 - 9). As always, your feedback is requested.
Big data is a popular topic these days. Though often misunderstood and commonly misrepresented, few deny that the volume and variety of data types now available to an enterprise is skyrocketing. In a separate article on the TDWI web site, I’ve tried to describe the likely sources of value to be derived from this deluge of data. In short, I see the harnessing of big data as an enormous opportunity.
Which is why Jaspersoft today announces the most comprehensive collection of Big Data connectors available from any Business Intelligence provider. In fact, we broadly consider three distinct categories of Big Data sources - all of which can now be natively accessed from Jaspersoft’s BI suite and very affordably deliver new value for an organization. These three categories are:
Hadoop - Jaspersoft supports Hadoop via the Hive SQL interface, reading files via HDFS including the Avro file format, as well as via HBase.
NoSQL - Jaspersoft offers NoSQL support for the following, broadly recognized major categories of data stores: Key Value Stores, Document Databases, BigTable Clones, Graph Databases, and Data Grid Caching among others. Jaspersoft’s open source projects for reporting against NoSQL technologies include: Cassandra, MongoDB, Riak, HBase, CouchDB, Neo4J, Infinispan, VoltDB and Redis. A non-open source connector is in beta for VMware GemFire.
MPP Analytic Database - Jaspersoft supports IBM’s Netezza MPP analytic database data warehouse and soon will add commercial analysis support. Vertica and EMC Greenplum are also supported.
We are passionate about making most of these connectors available through an open source license (A/GPL), true to the origins of many Big Data projects. We also expect to commercialize some of these connectors over time, expecting that many enterprises will want fully-supported and tested products complete with a commercial contract from Jaspersoft.
By supporting this breadth and depth of Big Data file types and data stores, Jaspersoft is extending its leadership as the most modern and flexible business intelligence platform available today. At once, our customers can install and use the Jaspersoft BI suite in a traditional, on-premises server - or deploy our tools as a platform-as-a-service reporting and analytics layer in the cloud. Now this architectural flexibility includes the most complete support for Big Data types in the industry.
I encourage you to learn more about our Big Data announcement, all the partners that have supported us through the development process, and the wide variety of connectors by going here. And, join us at the Strata Conference to see a demonstration of Jaspersoft 4 and its support for Big Data. Lastly, I also encourage you to participate in our Big Data community project, now live on JasperForge.
Of course, to see all-things Jaspersoft in action, I invite you to attend JasperWorld 2011, where the future of BI is now.
Today Jaspersoft makes available the fourth major generation of its business intelligence platform and I couldn’t be more proud. I’m proud because we’ve taken the time, with this major new release, to make significant architectural improvements that a software company rarely (if ever) takes the time to do.In fact, we’ve re-written the upper third of the overall platform architecture, creating a new and remarkably powerful, consistent, extensible layer that adheres purely to web standards.We refer to this new layer as the Jaspersoft UI Framework and the flexibility and sophistication it will provide to BI Builders is unparalleled.
We’re big fans of the BI Builder as the key new hero in the BI solution equation.I’ve written about this important role separately.This technical professional goes by many titles (software engineer, product manager, report developer, DW/BI Manager, Data Architect, and so on) and is responsible for developing, integrating and / or customizing a BI solution for an end-user audience.The BI Builder applies critical domain knowledge and BI expertise to turn data into information and insight, enabling a broader (and arguably less-skilled) group of users to benefit from business intelligence – making BI genuinely more pervasive along the way.
So, what does Jaspersoft 4’s UI Framework provide for the BI Builder?Lots.Here’s the summary:
Consumer Web Application-Style UI – the new UI Framework within Jaspersoft 4 delivers improved interactivity and usability typically found in consumer web applications. Its modern look and feel enhances web applications and gives end users access to intuitive, self-service BI.
100% Web Application Architecture – Jaspersoft 4 is the only BI environment that is 100% web application ready. The new UI Framework completes Jaspersoft’s architecture as a web application stack, from the back-end server to the front-end UI. Built on flexible, open web standards, Jaspersoft 4 can be deployed out-of-the-box on-premises, in a multi-tenant SaaS environment, or in the cloud.
Easy BI Web Application Customization and Integration – theJaspersoft UI architectureseparates the content and presentation layers allowing quick and easy UI customization through simple markup changes in cascading style sheets (CSS), without impacting the underlying functionality. Customizations are automatically carried forward as new Jaspersoft versions are deployed. The UI framework enables fast creation of alternative UI themes for different users, different SaaS tenants and different devices. This capability also facilitates the integration of the Jaspersoft BI server within existing web applications.
All by itself, I expect the concept of UI themes will set the new standard in customized BI applications, similar to what WordPress has done for the blogging platform market.Here are two screen shots of two Jaspersoft 4 themes.
The first screen (above) shows the out-of-the-box look-n-feel we’re delivering with Jaspersoft 4 and the second (below) provides a visual sample of some of the many elements that can be easily and radically changed.Previously, such substantial changes would need to be performed by expert personnel with technical familiarity with the complete platform.Now, these customizations can be done by any web designer or a savvy IT person.Customizing the UI of a BI application has traditionally been out-of-reach for most organizations – but now, with Jaspersoft 4, it won’t be.
Now that we’ve taken the time to create an even more flexible and sophisticated architecture, you can expect an impressive array of innovation coming on top of this.That’s because Jaspersoft 4 provides our customers and community with the foundation for the future.Stay tuned.
Jaspersoft 4 is available now and there is much more information available here. Take a look - I’ll be thrilled to get your feedback and comments.
P.S.I invite you to a complete and behind-the-scenes review of Jaspersoft 4 during JasperWorld 2011 (February 7-9 in San Francisco).
It was July 2008 when we initially launched what is today our modern JasperForge community web site.How proud we were.Shiny new features all designed to make our community members more capable, engaged, and productive.Now, we’re just as proud of the new version of JasperForge that made its debut a few weeks ago.
How to expand on some pretty sophisticated features already delivered? Our initial Forge already sported features like JasperBabylon, the section of our site where community members can help translate and localize Jaspersoft’s core open source products – or feature voting which allows community members to help prioritize which features are the most important to add or improve next.And, we had already delivered some relatively unmatched scalability and performance, as our Forge hosts more than 180,000 registered community members who collectively log nearly 1M page views and thousands of Forum entries every month.
So, advancing our already advanced Forge platform wasn’t easy. Thanks to our colleagues at Essentia, though, we did it.And so we are now proudly live with the latest release of what may be the open source world’s most advanced individual Forge.What’s key to this new release?
Upgraded monitoring and tracking of total visitors to a project page
New project download monitoring
40+ canned reports to improve measurement of key site metrics
Mercurial support for a de-centralized, high performance version control system
Advanced search features to enable faster, more granular results
Of all the new capabilities, I may be most proud that JasperServer is now integrated within the JasperForge platform.This new Forge delivers a wide variety of Administrative reports and analyses designed to allow thorough review of the traffic and activity within the Forge community.Currently only available for Administrators, you can expect future Forge releases to expose relevant analytics to the entire Community.
In summary, I couldn’t have said it any better than Jaspersoft’s technical co-founder, Giulio Toffoli:
“I’m extremely pleased to see Jaspersoft broaden JasperForge.org with a number of features that will increase productivity and ease of use. These are big benefits to community users, especially those who rely on low-cost, open source BI. The ongoing improvements to the forge tools re-enforces why Jaspersoft’s user community continues to thrive and grow.”
If you’ve not stopped by the new Forge, this is your formal invitation to do so.Comments and feedback encouraged.
During the past few years, Jaspersoft has (mostly) quietly hosted a wide number of local “meet ups” called JasperDirections.These evening events bring together several of our closest partners along with attendees from our community and customer base.The results have been fantastic, as we’ve hosted nearly 30 JasperDirections events around the world in the past two years, meeting with thousands of customers and partners in the process.As valuable as our customers and community tell us these events have been, I have to believe that Jaspersoft has benefited even more from the interaction and feedback we receive that helps us constantly calibrate our company and product direction.To all of you who have attended a JasperDirections event, you have my thanks and appreciation.
But, now the time has finally come. We’ve reached the point where adding an annual event to these local meet-ups is required.Our thousands of commercial customers (across more than 100 countries), nearly 1,000 software subscription customers, and more than 180,000 community members require and deserve the next step:JasperWorld.
And so we’re in the countdown to our inaugural JasperWorld event, to be held in San Francisco on February 7 – 9.We’ve chosen the Hyatt Regency Fisherman’s Wharf for this first-ever event because of its landmark location and willingness to put up with a bunch of open source BI fanatics for a few days.And we’ve lined up some world-class speakers and entertainment as well.
I’m thrilled to announce that Howard Dresner will provide a keynote address on February 8 and Marten Mickos will do so on February 9.Howard is the well-known business intelligence analyst and industry expert who spent so many years at Gartner, then did an executive stint at Hyperion (until it was acquired by Oracle) and now is the principal of Dresner Advisory Services.Marten is the former CEO of MySQL, the current CEO of Eucalyptus Systems and has been a good friend to Jaspersoft for some time.I’m eager to share the stage with these gentlemen during JasperWorld.
We’re planning a wide variety of technical sessions that enable our partners, customers and community to learn, share and advance their BI agenda – all focused on Jaspersoft products and technologies.Of course, our technical founders (Teodor Danciu – JasperReports, and Giulio Toffoli – iReport) and many of our key technical staff members will attend, lead sessions and be available to meet with customers and community members.And, we have some great partners who will help sponsor this event, enriching the value for everyone.Lastly, we have some fun planned (of course) – Jaspersoft style.You’ll have to attend to learn more!
Yesterday, Jaspersoft announced JasperReports Server Professional Edition, our first commercial offering built precisely for those who require sophisticated reports, designed and developed professionally - and scheduled and delivered interactively. This new offering is architected to match the substantial rise in interest for affordable reporting for both stand-alone and embedded uses - in organizations of all sizes. Indeed, by engaging our community, and listening to their feedback, we designed a reporting server that could address their need for interactive reporting with security and scheduling, while providing the assurance of a commercial subscription.
In addition to a robust feature set (for this reporting customer type), I am proud that we’re making this professional edition product available at a fraction of the price of any traditional competitor - delivering the most affordable and powerful reporting server available in the world today.
JasperReports Server is our recommended product for organizations requiring an affordable reporting solution for interactive, operational, and production-based reporting. Deployed as a standalone reporting server or integrated inside another application, JasperReports Server is a flexible, powerful, interactive reporting environment for small or large enterprises. And, it’s powered by the world’s most popular reporting tools: JasperReports and iReport. Now, developers and users can take advantage of more interactivity, security, and scheduling of their reports with a remarkably cost-effective offering.
I expect this to be the perfect complement to those who’ve been using JasperReports (and iReport) and so we’ve announced JasperReports Server Professional with a special introductory price and we’re making it very easy to learn more about this product. Here are some resources to do so:
Because Jaspersoft is so well-known for reporting, I’m watching the feedback and questions about this new product very closely. If you have comments or questions, I’d be eager to know.
