JasperSoft's open-source BI goes international
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Open-source BI software vendor JasperSoft is set to unveil the final piece in its BI suite, JasperETL, after signing its first full-blown OEM deal with French vendor Talend. At the same time, the U.S. company will commit to complete internationalization of its entire BI suite.
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TechWeb - Anacubis Desktop 3.0 shows the BI potential of information visualization software.
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InfoWorld - French software maker Business Objects released the first of three new versions of its business intelligence software tailored for small to medium-size companies, a market area poised for growth, the company said Monday.
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Business Objects has released the second of three planned versions of its Crystal Decisions business intelligence software suiteÂ aimed at midmarket users.
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Many emerging market businesses will soon have access to the IBM Rational software development platform for the first time, through the open source Eclipse development framework.
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(InfoWorld) - JasperSoft Corp.'s open-source business intelligence products are speaking more languages than ever since the launch of an internationalization project in January. The translation project, JasperBabylon , has invited the JasperSoft developer community to translate the business intelligence suite into 30 to 35 languages, said JasperSoft CEO Paul Doscher. A peek at JasperBabylon shows the translation projects are in varying stages of completion depending on the language, and there's no timetable when certain languages will be fully translated, Doscher said. Some developers, for example, choose to translate certain modules in a particular font they need for their projects, he said. Most software developers are "comfortable with using English," but for JasperSoft to gain wider acceptance, it's important to have it in local languages, Doscher said. The most recent release of JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite Professional Edition 2.0 has been fully translated into French, German, Italian and Japanese, Doscher said. JasperSoft is competing in a hot BI market with vendors such as Business Objects and Oracle. Like many other open-source vendors, JasperSoft allows users to download basic versions of its products and makes money by offering support packages. Doscher said JasperSoft has about 6,000 paying customers, with an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 businesses using the free versions. Business tend to buy support from JasperSoft as they become more dependent on the software for their operations, Doscher said. For those customers, JasperSoft is planning to release upgraded versions of its suite every four months, a shipping cycle that businesses expect from proprietary software companies, Doscher said. He wouldn't say what's in store for the next release except that developers are working on better integration with business applications in addition to new "ad hoc" features that allow end users more flexibility to customize the data they're organizing. However, JasperSoft is closing in on the release of the final piece of its BI suite. Users can expect within the next six weeks the professional version of JasperETL (Extract, Transfer and Load), a tool to clean up data and move it into a data warehouse, Doscher said. Â
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The Orbeon Integration Suite (OIS) open source project offers a modular, enterprise-ready, ESB-based business integration software suite.
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(InfoWorld) - Business Objects has started to roll out a full suite of business intelligence (BI) software in the form of an online service, initially for customers using Salesforce.com applications. The service allows customers to use Business Objects' BI tools without having to maintain the software themselves or buy extra servers on which to run it. Business Objects maintains a copy of each customer's data in its own data centers, and employees access the data and BI applications through a Web browser. Business Objects took itsÂ first steps in on-demand softwareÂ last April with the release of crystalreports.com, for sharing reports online. That service has attracted about 50,000 customers, the company said. The new service announced Monday, called Intelligence OnDemand, includes a broader set of applications for formatted reporting, running ad hoc queries and analysis, and displaying BI "dashboards" on a user's desktop. The first version of the service, available now, is for customers who have data stored in Salesforce.com's online CRM applications. Business Objects will load a copy of the customer's Salesforce data to its own data centers and build a data warehouse that customers can use to run their BI queries. The service is aimed at sales and marketing staff and business analysts at companies with a high volume of Salesforce data, and is the first in suite of similar services that Business Objects plans to roll out, the company said. It includes on-demand versions of its Crystal Reports, Crystal Xcelsius and Web Intelligence products. Business Objects has staked outÂ an early lead in on-demand BI, although SAS Institute and some smaller BI vendors are also getting into the game. Proponents of such services say they helps customers to cut costs because they don't have to manage applications themselves or buy servers on which to run them. Business Objects said it's new service will take the "heavy lifting" out of building and maintaining a data warehouse. The trade-off is that customers must trust a third party to look after and provide access to their sensitive company data. Business Objects representatives weren't available to give pricing for the new service, which will be unveiled at an event in California later on Monday to coincide with the start of Salesforce.com's Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco. Some more information is at Business Objects new On Demand Web site. The company also opened an online store on Monday where customers can buy external market information, such as sales data for other companies' products, and include it in their data analysis. The information comes from firms such as Thomson Financial, eBay, and Dun & Bradstreet. Customers can buy individual reports from $150, or sign up for a subscription. Â
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Blog: The database software maker has a new version out that can talk to other databases written in SQL.
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IBM is releasing software that can predict the spread of infectious diseases among countries.
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(InfoWorld) - Business Objects released new software WednesdayÂ that combines EPM (enterprise performance management), BI, and data integration into a comprehensive suite aimed at CFOs and business finance managers. The suite, called BusinessObjects EPM XI, integrates products from several acquisitions the company has made over the last two years, includingÂ performance management software from Cartesis,Â ALG, andÂ SRC Software. Those products, combined with Business Object's BI and analytics software, are now integrated on top of the company's XI data-integration and visualization platform. All told, the new product allows CFOs to see and share data from various business analysis and EPM applications -- such as enterprise reporting, scorecarding, sales and budgeting information -- in one software suite, said Marge Breya, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Business Objects on a conference call Wednesday. Business Objects, which has headquarters in Paris and San Jose, California, remains one of the only BI pure plays still standing, and the company shows little sign of slowing down amid heightened competition. The company moved into the fast-growing EPM space a couple of years ago to keep up with some of its big-name competitors, which include not only traditional BI vendors like Cognos, but also more diversified applications vendors, such as Oracle and SAP. Even Microsoft plans to get deeper into the fray next month when it will expand its BI repertoire with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007. However, Business Objects does not, like Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, sell CRM or ERP software, and differentiates itself by positioning its software as independent and able to run on any set of enterprise applications. EPM XI is the first EPM suite to include profitability analytics, and its ability to make so much analysis and performance information available to financial decision-makers in every part of the enterprise differentiates it from competitors, said Trevor Walker, vice president of product marketing. The suite also includes new software to automate and speed up the process of closing out financial transactions, which is called "the close" and a particular pain point for CFOs, he said. More information about EPM XI can be found on Business Objects' Web site. The software is expected to be generally available on Sept. 30
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TechWeb - The iReport Plug-In for Eclipse is a graphical designer used to add reporting functions to applications. The new tool, along with JasperSoft's reporting libraries, are available at no charge under open-source licenses.
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Business Objects, an SAP company, unveiled today the next iteration of its business intelligence platform, XI 3.0.Bigger and in some ways better than previous versions, it includes so many features that it may be a bit daunting to some users.Leveraging Business Objects' acquisition of InXight Software in May 2007, XI 3.0 ties together structured information with unstructured information."Now you can read through e-mails, Web pages, and documents to understand text and extract sentiment from text," said Franz Aman, vice president for business intelligence platform, product marketing at Business Objects.Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting, called the ability to include unstructured data a significant improvement in the platform. "It is an acknowledgement that data comes from all kinds of applications and all kinds of formats," he said.The technology parses and organizes unstructured data so that users can apply more traditional, i.e. more statistically-oriented, methods to the data.Greenbaum said that although it is a "somewhat artificial" structure, it does lend itself to data analysis, and he called that an enormous improvement for businesses that have grown so much more complex over the years. "ERP used to be about one activity, closing the books every quarter," he saidTraceability is another key feature in XI 3.0. The technology can trace back the so-called lineage of data in order to give users better insight into how the data was created, what transformation it might have gone through, and whether or not is was merged with another data set.While knowing the lineage of data is a must-have for regulatory and compliance, it is also essential to good business, said Greenbaum, noting that it is a vast improvement over the old days when executives sat around arguing over the data in a single cell in a spreadsheet.The lineage capability is only available to those who buy the optional Business Objects Data Services that combine Data Integrator and Data Quality components.Another significant improvement in the platform is a technology dubbed Polestar that gives non-technical users the ability to do complex searches and to make natural language queries. "You don't have to be a special user with SQL knowledge to find information," said Aman.??However, Greenbaum said that while XI does a good job in elevating the accessibility and comprehensiveness of BI it is also a "bit of a Swiss Army knife." "What haven't they put into this product?" he wondered.Nevertheless, it should also replace all the departmental one-off solutions that are typically floating around a company, according to Greenbaum.While XI 3.0 was in development long before Business Objects was acquired by SAP in January 2007, there are some unique linkages between XI 3.0 and SAP applications, said Aman. For example, XI is more tightly intertwined with the SAP Business Warehouse and offers faster performance when users tap into data that comes from R3 or the Warehouse than if the data was from a non-SAP source.Also, XI can tap into SAP's use of metadata so that if a user in North America searches for Total Revenue, and a user in France is looking for the same information, despite the fact that the French use a phrase other than Total Revenue, both will get back the same information because of the metadata layer.Business Objects 3.0 will be available later in the first quarter. Later in the year, it will also be available as a SaaS offering.
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Information Builders unveiled a new version of its WebFocus BI tool set at its annual Summit User Conference held this week in Las Vegas.
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(InfoWorld) - Open-source database vendor MySQL and business intelligence (BI) software provider JasperSoftÂ on Tuesday announced a joint reselling agreement. As part of the agreement, MySQL will resell Jasper for MySQL: OEM Edition, a repackaging of JasperSoft's reporting tools, to its commercial independent software vendor (ISV) and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) customers. The BI tools will enable developers to more easily incorporate reporting capabilities into the products they build on top of the MySQL database. The BI tools include JasperSoft's iReport graphical report designer and JasperReports reporting system. In return, JasperSoft will be able to resell MySQL database software as part of its JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite. Jasper for MySQL costs $195 per server. The partnership is the latest to be struck between open-source companies as a way to more tightly integrate their respective products so that customers don't have to try and piece the offerings together themselves. One of the strengths of proprietary software is the tight integration of stacks of software from databases up through applications. In order to provide a real alternative to closed-source software, open-source vendors are focusing more and more intensely on integration issues. MySQL competes against proprietary database players like IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, pitting its software both against their entry-level free databases and their commercial enterprise offerings. In the BI market, JasperSoft encounters Business Objects and Oracle and increasingly Microsoft as the software giant offers more reporting functionality in its applications. Earlier this month, JasperSoft was one of theÂ founding members of the Open Solutions AllianceÂ (OSA), a new nonprofit consortium of open-source providers of business software. The body's main goal is to work on resolving open-source interoperability issues to make life easier for business users looking to integrate products from different vendors. Another founding member of OSA is French open-source data integration startup Talend. In late January, JasperSoft announced its first majorÂ OEM deal with Talend. The partnership has enabled the U.S. vendor to complete its BI suite with the addition of an enhanced version of Talend's Open Studio software known as JasperETL. In December, MySQL unveiled aÂ partnership with Open-XchangeÂ allowing the open-source company to embed the MySQL database into its Linux-based collaboration server. Â
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This paper explains how the newest offering from Cognos - Cognos 8 Business Intelligence - can help organizations avoid the "Fatal Flaws" of Business Intelligence and Performance Management.  The Cognos Views are not intended to be exhaustive; rather, they are intended to act as an introduction to Cognos 8 BI and a catalyst for further reading.
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Open-source database to jump from beta testing to production within three months.