April 01, 2009, 2:54 PM — Jaspersoft is adding integrated in-memory analysis functions and SaaS (software as a service) capabilities to Version 3.5 of its BI tool, released on Wednesday. The move opens the way for application service providers to use it to offer hosted BI services.
"In Jaspersoft, as in many BI suites, there was a difference between where you could do your dashboarding and your BI reporting, and if you wanted to do multidimensional analysis, you needed to add another module," said Nick Halsey, the company's vice president of marketing.
Now the company is putting a new toolbar on BI (business intelligence) dashboard pages allowing users to analyze data directly from whatever page they happen to be looking at.
By default, the analysis is performed in the Web browser, in the memory of the client PC.
But, said Halsey, "Say your client is an iPhone and you don't have the memory. In that case, you can push the analysis down to the database and take advantage of the back-end system."
With the latest release the version number jumps straight to 3.5 from 3.1, a major change given Jaspersoft's usual conservatism with version numbering, said Halsey.
The leap is justified because the new functionality goes beyond what proprietary vendors can deliver, he said. "That makes the fact that we are open source secondary."
Jaspersoft 3.5 allows multitenant administration, allowing businesses to segregate access to data from different departments, or service providers to offer cloud-based BI functions to multiple clients.
However, Jaspersoft will leave such offerings strictly to third-party service providers: "We are not going to offer Jaspersoft services in the cloud," said Halsey.
The new version of the software should soon turn up in the Icebreaker BI software appliance developed by Jaspersoft and open-source database vendor Ingres.
Customers don't want to receive updates too frequently, so Ingres must strike a balance when it comes to incorporating new functionality in the appliance, said pre-sales engineer Stéphane Padique.
Jaspersoft 3.5 is already going through the qualification process for inclusion in Icebreaker, said Padique.
"We are working with them aggressively on that now. I think it's a matter of weeks before that's released," said Halsey.
