Jaspersoft
Analysis of Jaspersoft and its open source business intelligence products. Related subjects include:
Third-party analytics
This is one of a series of posts on business intelligence and related analytic technology subjects, keying off the 2011/2012 version of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms. The four posts in the series cover:
- Overview comments about the 2011/2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, as well as a link to the actual document.
- Business intelligence industry trends — some of Gartner’s thoughts but mainly my own.
- Company-by-company comments based on the 2011/2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms.
- (This post) Third-party analytics, pulling together and expanding on some points I made in the first three posts.
I’ve written a lot this weekend about various areas of business intelligence and related analytics. A recurring theme has been what we might call third-party analytics — i.e., anything other than buying analytic technology and deploying it in your own enterprise. Four main areas include:
- Business intelligence software OEMed to packaged operational application vendors.
- Business intelligence software OEMed to SaaS (Software as a Service) application vendors.
- Business intelligence software bundled into information-selling businesses.
- Stakeholder-facing analytics, which usually is just BI allowing customers (or suppliers, investors, citizens, etc.) to look into one of your databases.
| Categories: Business intelligence, Business Objects, Information Builders, Intersystems and Cache', Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 1 Comment |
The 2011/2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms — company-by-company comments
This is one of a series of posts on business intelligence and related analytic technology subjects, keying off the 2011/2012 version of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms. The four posts in the series cover:
- Overview comments about the 2011/2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, as well as a link to the actual document.
- Business intelligence industry trends — some of Gartner’s thoughts but mainly my own.
- (This post) Company-by-company comments based on the 2011/2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms.
- Third-party analytics, pulling together and expanding on some points I made in the first three posts.
The heart of Gartner Group’s 2011/2012 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms was the company comments. I shall expound upon some, roughly in declining order of Gartner’s “Completeness of Vision” scores, dubious though those rankings may be. Read more
Intelligent Enterprise’s Editors’/Editor’s Choice list for 2010
As he has before, Intelligent Enterprise Editor Doug Henschen
- Personally selected annual lists of 12 “Most influential” companies and 36 “Companies to watch” in analytics- and database-related sectors.
- Made it clear that these are his personal selections.
- Nonetheless has called it an Editors’ Choice list, rather than Editor’s Choice. 🙂
(Actually, he’s really called it an “award.”)
Research agenda for 2010
As you may have noticed, I’ve been posting less research/analysis in November and December than during some other periods. In no particular order, reasons have included: Read more
Introduction to Gooddata
Around the end of the Cold War, Esther Dyson took it upon herself to go repeatedly to Eastern Europe and do a lot of rah-rah and catalysis, hoping to spark software and other computer entrepreneurs. I don’t know how many people’s lives she significantly affected – I’d guess it’s actually quite a few – but in any case the number is not zero. Roman Stanek, who has built and sold a couple of software business, cites her as a key influence setting him on his path.
Roman’s latest venture is business intelligence firm Gooddata. Gooddata was founded in 2007 and has been soliciting and getting attention for a while, so I was surprised to learn that Gooddata officially launched just a few weeks ago. Anyhow, some less technical highlights of the Gooddata story include: Read more
Business intelligence notes and trends
I keep not finding the time to write as much about business intelligence as I’d like to. So I’m going to do one omnibus post here covering a lot of companies and trends, then circle back in more detail when I can. Top-level highlights include:
- Jaspersoft has a new v3.5 product release. Highlights include multi-tenancy-for-SaaS and another in-memory OLAP option. Otherwise, things sound qualitatively much as I wrote last September.
- Inforsense has a cool composite-analytical-applications story. More precisely, they said my phrase “analytics-oriented EAI” was an “exceptionally good” way to describe their focus. Inforsense’s biggest target market seems to be health care, research and clinical alike. Financial services is next in line.
- Tableau Software “gets it” a little bit more than other BI vendors about the need to decide for yourself how to define metrics. (Of course, it’s possible that other “exploration”-oriented new-style vendors are just as clued-in, but I haven’t asked in the right way.)
- Jerome Pineau’s favorable view of Gooddata and unfavorable view of Birst are in line with other input I trust. I’ve never actually spoken with the Gooddata folks, however.
- Seth Grimes suggests the qualitative differences between open-source and closed-source BI are no longer significant. He has a point, although I’d frame it more as being about the difference between the largest (but acquisition-built) BI product portfolios and the smaller (but more home-grown) ones, counting open source in the latter group.
- I’ve discovered about five different in-memory OLAP efforts recently, and no doubt that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
- I’m hearing ever more about public-facing/extranet BI. Information Builders is a leader here, but other vendors are talking about it too.
A little more detail Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Business intelligence, Information Builders, Inforsense, Jaspersoft, QlikTech and QlikView, Scientific research, Tableau Software | 8 Comments |
Introduction to Pentaho
I finally caught up with Pentaho, which along with Jaspersoft is one of the two most visible open source business intelligence companies, Actuate perhaps excepted. Highlights included:
- Much like Jaspersoft, Pentaho’s initial focus was mainly on embedded, operational BI.
- However, Pentaho now feels it has a decent end-user GUI as well, and traditional-BI is a bigger part of sales.
- Also, some sales are focused on data integration, perhaps in support of more traditional BI products. Pentaho has even had an Ab Initio replacement in data integration. (Can there be any change more extreme than going from Ab Initio to open source?)
- As an example of technical breadth, Pentaho says that its Mondrian OLAP engine is used by Jaspersoft.
- Pentaho has Excel output, but not in the form of live formulas.
- Pentaho does XQuery.
- Industries with more Pentaho adoption than average include:
- Financial services (traditionally open-source-friendly, according to Pentaho)
- Government (ditto)
- Web 2.0 (obviously ditto)
- Travel/transportation (cash-strapped)
- Frontier Airlines is a Pentaho/Greenplum customer.
- TradeDoubler is a Pentaho/InfoBright customer. (Pentaho thinks that TradeDoubler reloads its warehouse every day, which if true frankly casts some doubt on InfoBright’s architecture.)
- Data mining is something of a Pentaho sideline. There’s some university in New Zealand that built data mining capabilities in Pentaho, and some data mining research is done in that. Separately, Pentaho has been integrated with R.
- Community contributions are concentrated in the areas you’d expect — features some user or system integrator needs for a specific project, connectors, bug reports, and the like.
| Categories: Ab Initio Software, Application areas, Business intelligence, Data integration and middleware, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Greenplum, Infobright, Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Pricing | 7 Comments |
Introduction to Jaspersoft – the actual business
There were so many numbers in my introductory call with Jaspersoft that I’ve split them out in a separate post. With that out of the way, here’s what’s really going on, per Nick Halsey.
The Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite is BI technology designed to be integrated with operational apps. Thus, Jaspersoft says that operational BI is the core of its business. In particular: Read more
| Categories: Business intelligence, Jaspersoft, Open source | 3 Comments |
Jaspersoft numbers
I chatted Friday with marketing VP Nick Halsey of Jaspersoft, which is probably the most successful open source business intelligence company. (That’s based just anecdotally, on mentions. I’d put Pentaho #2, with Talend commonly getting mentioned along with the two BI vendors for its ETL.) I’ll go straight to the numbers, per Nick, before talking in a separate post about what Jaspersoft actually sells.