JasperSoft claims to be most widely deployed BI tool

by Chris Kanaracus

March 18, 2008 —

JasperSoft, the open-source
business intelligence vendor, is claiming that it is now the world's most widely
deployed BI product.

"That will probably come as a surprise to a lot of people," said
CEO Brian Gentile.

The San Francisco company claims its core product has been downloaded more
than 3 million times, and that it has 65,000 registered developers, greater
than 80,000 "production deployments," 300-plus projects ongoing at
JasperForge.org, and
more than 8,000 commercial customers in 96 countries.

Observers of the BI space said the company's popularity claims should be viewed
in the proper light.

"The key here is open source (free) vs. commercial license implementations,"
said Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson via e-mail. "I don't really
track open source BI that closely, since it's usually used by developers to
embed some portion of the code in other applications. The commercial version
of JasperSoft (that comes with support, upgrades, documentation and a few features
not available under open source license) is far from being the most widely deployed
in the world."

David O'Connell, an analyst with Nucleus
Research, also said reality may differ from what the company's numbers suggest.
"They're open source and have tons of downloads from developers, but I
wonder how many BI end-users are out there," he said Friday. "Nucleus
interviews lots of companies that have deployed BI. We always ask who they considered
when they bought, and JasperSoft has never come up."

By "production deployments," JasperSoft means instances where an
organization has taken one or more of its products and put it into some type
of production use, Gentile said.

Nick Halsey, vice president of marketing at JasperSoft, said 30 percent of
the company's 8,000 commercial customers are in the Fortune 500/Global 2000
category, while the remaining 70 percent lies in the midmarket. "'With
larger companies you can guarantee they have more than one BI tool," he
acknowledged, but added, "in the midmarket there's a significantly higher
chance we're the first BI tool they've used."

The company said it also has integrations or OEM (original equipment manufacturer)
relationships with a number of open-source relational database management systems
(RDBMS), including Ingres,
EnterpriseDB, MySQL
and Greenplum Bizgres.

Gentile repeatedly cited the scope and strength of JasperSoft's developer base.
To that end, the company is set to release a tool for tracking the health of
an open-source community, under the Creative Commons license.

The Community Vibrancy Index derives a health score by weighing a broad series
of metrics, including an open-source project's ranking on Sourceforge, the number
of related forum posts and the number of downloads. "We tried to get more
scientific about how we measured the health of the community," Gentile
said.

In addition, the company is set to release a number of upgrades to the community
edition of its BI suite. The features include a Flash exporter for working with
Adobe's Flex development environment and support for the JSR-168 portal integration
standard. The company also said its software now has support for more than 20
languages.

IDG News Service