Jaspersoft aims its open-source analytics suite at PaaS vendors

IDG News Service - Open-source BI (business intelligence) vendor Jaspersoft wants its software to become another arrow in the quiver for developers using commercial PaaS (platform-as-a-service) offerings.

The community edition of Jaspersoft's suite is now available on Red Hat's OpenShift and CloudForms services, the company said Tuesday. Another announcement with VMWare is coming soon.

Rather than a packaged SaaS (software-as-a-service) offering, Jaspersoft's move is meant to give developers using those services an easy way to add embedded analytics to their applications, said Karl Van den Bergh, vice president of products and alliances.

While Red Hat and Jaspersoft have already done some joint development to make the integration possible, it will be refined further, Van den Bergh said. The goal "is to make that experience of building, testing, integrating and deploying really simple and quick."

Jaspersoft deliberately chose to first port its community edition, rather than any of the commercial versions the company also sells, in order to speed adoption by PaaS developers, according to Van den Bergh. "We want to seed the market. Our goal is to become the BI standard for cloud applications," he said.

Currently, PaaS revenues are a small percentage of IT spending, which is underscored by the fact that OpenShift and Cloud Foundry both remain in beta. But analyst firms such as Forrester Research have estimated the market will grow to well over $10 billion during this decade.

PaaS offerings are attractive to developers who wish to quickly prototype and deploy applications without the need to acquire dedicated hardware and other resources. Jaspersoft is hoping to gain a foothold and then benefit from that projected growth as PaaS projects become more widespread and larger-scale.

To that end, PaaS developers who use the community edition and then decide to purchase a commercial subscription later won't have to rewrite anything, according to Van den Bergh. "It works exactly the same. You just get added functionality and support."

Jaspersoft plans to target other PaaSes, initially ones that are "Java-centric," as Jaspersoft is under the covers, he said. Candidates in that realm could include Salesforce.com's Heroku, which recently added Java support.

Jaspersoft's decision to target multiple PaaSes differs from competitors such as Gooddata, which offers a dedicated BI development platform hosted on Amazon Web Services.

But Jaspersoft partner Full 360 has taken a somewhat similar approach, offering a BI stack on AWS that combines Jaspersoft on the front end with the Vertica analytic database and ETL (extract, transform and load) tools from Talend.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris's e-mail address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com