Open Source Solutions

Yesterday I spent the afternoon with Andrew Lampitt, Senior Manager Business Development, Nick Halsey, VP of Marketing, and Ian Frey, Director of Product Management & Product Marketing, at JasperSoft HQ in downtown San Francisco.

We discussed a wide variety of topics such as all of our backgrounds, JasperSoft's history, strategies, and future plans. Here's a sampling of the conversation.

• As announced in January, JasperETL is based upon Talend Open Studio. JasperSoft found Talend Open Studio to be a very mature and well-planned data integration product. While the Talend Open Studio ETL tool was only released in the latter part of 2006, it is the result of a three year R & D effort led by former Informatica and DataStage personnel system integrators [updated 20070416]. The goal of JasperETL is to provide an easy-to-use but fully featured graphical ETL tool to facilitate data integration for the Jasper BI Suite.
• There are over l30 active projects available for download on JasperForge. According to the forge statistics, 38 are public and 93 are private. Some of these projects use JasperSoft products, some extend them, and some provide embedding or integration of JasperSoft products into other applications. This led to a discussion of the Jasper4 program vs. other adapters; JasperSoft provides the functions in a Jasper4 branded application, such as Jasper4salesforce, while adapters or other applications from the community or third-parties would not carry the Jasper4 brand. CRM is a particularly active area as exemplified by the SugarCRM adapter, the partnership with Centric [see the OSA announcement] & the previously mentioned Jasper4salesforce.
• JasperSoft has 5000 payinq customers in 81 countries, approximately half are ISVs embedding JasperSoft capabilities into their own products, projects or offerings.
• JasperAnalysis & JasperServer are separate projects but share the same framework, which is why they were originally released on the JasperForge as JasperIntelligence, but they are currently being branded as Jasper BI suite; Ian gave a presentation showing the architecture and roadmap.

Overall it was an informative afternoon, and we're looking forward to working more with JasperSoft BI Suite in the future.