Jaspersoft, now a TIBCO company, provides a BI platform based on open source software. This is a solid, widely used product set, that delivers a no frills BI environment and will meet the needs of most organizations with ease. All the usual functionality is included – reporting, dashboards, analysis and data integration.
A great deal is made of the ability to embed Jaspersoft charts, reports, graphs, dashboards – and so on, into production business applications (SOAP and REST protocols are used in addition to other mechanisms). A variety of services make the environment fairly easy to use, once they have been set up they look after security, metadata and scheduling activities.
The BI suite consists of 5 components:
- JasperReports Library – widely used reporting engine
- Jaspersoft Studio – an Eclipse based report designer
- JasperReports Server
- Jaspersoft ETL – extraction of data from transactional systems and creation of data warehouse/mart.
- Jaspersoft OLAP
An in-memory columnar database engine is employed to provide aggregation support and this speeds up some operations by over an order of magnitude.
As with many other open source BI platforms Jaspersoft is well liked by developers and can be extended if necessary. Over all it provides a reasonably priced, effective environment to develop and deploy BI applications. It can be best summed up as ‘vanilla’, but not in a derogatory sense. It simply does what is required without a great deal of fuss.