Jaspersoft 3.7 Expands Enterprise Business Intelligence

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Open source business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft is out today with a new release of its namesake platform, adding new features and a new enterprise-specific edition.

Jaspersoft CEO Brian Gentile told InternetNews.com that there are more than 25 feature enhancements in Jaspersoft 3.7, such as expanded in-memory analysis capabilities, including new methods of multidimensional data analysis.

The new capabilities build on features that first debuted with the Jaspersoft 3.5 release in April 2009. He said some of the in-memory enhancements made in the 3.7 were ideas that Jaspersoft had back in the 3.5 timeframe but simply didn’t have the time to implement.

“We always knew there were a large number of integrated in-memory analysis enhancements we wanted to make, so this is the next iteration,” Gentile said. “You’ll see us continue to improve this with every release going forward, as it’s a key part of our strategy.”

The Jaspersoft 3.7 release caps off a solid year of growth for the open source vendor despite the down economy, it said.

“Business is strong and as we conclude our year at the end of January we’re expecting to see 60 percent growth year over year,” Gentile said.

At least part of that growth could come from a strong focus on enterprise customers. Jaspersoft is now also rolling out an enterprise edition of its business intelligence suite that provides new OLAP-type integration support.

To date, Jaspersoft has offered two editions of its software — the community edition and the professional edition.

Now, the addition of a new enterprise edition provides further capabilities for large business customers’ use, including a full Relational Online Analytical Processing — or ROLAP — server.

Specifically, it includes the Jasper Analytics tool, a full ROLAP server based on the Mondrian open source project. It also offers the jpivots graphical front-end tool, which allows for the creation of pivot tables and multidimensional views.

“This gives customers a choice between using the in-memory capabilities and ROLAP,” Gentile said.

While his company aims to enable users to choose between a standalone OLAP server and Jaspersoft’s own similar in-memory services, Gentile said he hopes that over time, users will opt for Jaspersoft’s in-memory capability as it continues to be developed and enhanced.

Gentile added that Jaspersoft will have a technical document available later this quarter to help users identify when it makes sense to use the ROLAP server versus Jaspersoft 3.7’s in-memory analysis capabilities.

Another new addition with the enterprise version is the inclusion of audit logging and compliance functionality.

“Large customers need to know what’s going on inside of the server,” Gentile said. “They need to know which reports are being accessed, when and by whom and they need to know which reports are the most frequently accessed. This allows our customer to ensure both performance and compliance of the system.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the internet.com network.