Application
In contrast to many purely cloud-based Business Intelligence vendors, Jaspersoft with more than 10 years of experience in analytics industry decided in 2007 to make their traditional Jaspersoft Enterprise BI Suite available also in the cloud. Concept has attracted more than 100 customers so far, including companies like AdGenesis, ENERGYSYS, QED Financial Systems and Virgin Money.
Jaspersoft currently partners with Full360, which offers hosting and implementation support for customers considering outsourced Jaspersoft solution on Amazon EC2 infrastructure. Pricing is based on size of deployment and you need to contact Full360 directly in order to get quotes or more information, what makes it little more complicated when considering easy-to-buy and transparency advantage of other cloud-based vendors.
Secondly, Jaspersoft is preparing to partner with PaaS (Platform as a Service) providers and in conjunction offer cloud environment for developers (and IT departments) to integrate and exploit Jaspersoft’s analytics and reporting capabilities when building their own applications. Jaspersoft currently cannot disclose negotiated partnerships with PaaS providers, but promises to come up with more details within next 30 days.
Despite it seems impossible to easily examine and test Jaspersoft’s environment prior to the purchase, company also prepared light-weighted trial version of their on-premise solution located in the cloud, where you can immediately try basic operations of analyzing data, creating reports and composing dashboards. You can access Jaspersoft Live here.
Data integration
Even on the field of connectivity, Jaspersoft shows its mature and experienced position, offering wide variety of integration possibilities. Thanks to OEM partnership with Talend, Jaspersoft’s customers get access to fully featured ETL tool enabling connection to both relational and multidimensional data sources as well as fellow cloud based applications such as Salesforce.com. If you don’t intend to execute comprehensive data transformation operations, Jaspersoft also gives you possibility to use agnostic connectors and via JDBC link to Oracle, SQL, MySQL and many more database engines as well as “Big Data” non-SQL storages such as Hadoop and MongoDB.
Final
This unconventional approach of providing cloud Business Intelligence brings few singularities.
On the positive side, customers get access to more advanced software than existing pure-cloud solutions, enriched of ad-hoc querying, OLAP in-memory analysis and data integration. Complexity of the platform is ensured by rich set of applications included in vendor’s proprietary Enterprise BI Suite (composed of Jaspersoft ETL, Jaspersoft OLAP, Jaspersoft Report Server and iDesigner). On the other hand, nothing is for free and you cannot expect Plans and Pricing set similarly to traditional cloud vendors.
Therefore, we strongly recommend SMB companies to consider their needs for all features (especially necessity to execute comprehensive data transformation operations and OLAP capabilities) when planning to deploy cloud-based Business Intelligence tool. Jaspersoft tries not to lose pace and follow current trend of moving into the cloud, but non-standardized Plans and Procing policy as well as complicated partnership chain makes it less comfortable for small customers looking for easy-to-buy-easy-to-use solution.