JasperSoft Announces Significant Updates to its Business Intelligence Suite Community Edition
Mar 19th, 00:58 UTC
Enhancements improve user experience and developer productivity while delivering new integration capabilities
SAN FRANCISCO, MARCH 18, 2008 -- JasperSoft Corporation, the market leader in open source business intelligence (BI), today announced extensive enhancements to its JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite Community Edition, including the new JasperReports Flash Exporter and JasperAnalysis OLAP Workbench. The enhancements also include improved integration between JasperSoft's market-leading graphical reporting building tool (called iReport) and Jasper Server, support for new portal integration standards, and more. These upgrades extend JasperSoft's ability to address the needs of its complete community by providing the best open source BI functionality available today. The JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite community edition can be downloaded by going to http://www.jaspersoft.com/downloads.html.
"The new functionality we're announcing today reflects advancements provided by our incredibly active community of BI customers, developers and partners. With more than 80,000 production deployments worldwide, JasperSoft supports the most widely used BI software in the world," said Brian Gentile, chief executive officer, JasperSoft. "These significant advancements in open source business intelligence capabilities demonstrate our commitment to meeting the needs of customers across communities and geographies."
Industry analysts consistently rate business intelligence software as a top priority for organizations in the year ahead. With tightening IT budgets, business intelligence is the critical enabler of improved decisions and processes that optimize business performance. With rapid consolidation of traditional commercial BI vendors, organizations are increasingly looking to modern open source alternatives. JasperSoft's Community Edition updates include important features that meet the needs of this growing global market.
"Open source business intelligence software is gaining share in the market and findings from a recent IDC survey suggests there will be an accelerated rate of adoption in 2008." said Henry Morris, Senior Vice President of Software and Services Research at IDC. "JasperSoft BI Suite Community Edition exemplifies this trend, demonstrating how an active community brings a steady stream of enhancements to meet priority user requirements."
Hundreds of recent updates have been made to the JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite Community Edition, including:
JasperReports Flash Exporter is the newest add-on to the JasperReports reporting library, allowing documents generated by JasperReports to be exported to the Flash format using the Adobe Flex SDK. This brings easier integration of JasperReports with Flash-based applications.
Spreadsheet Exporter has been extended with the addition of a new data-centric exporter for Microsoft Excel to better enable downstream analysis of data in Excel, in addition to retaining the previously existing Excel exporter which exports richly formatted reports to Excel. Also, JasperServer now includes a standard CSV exporter to support data export in a target neutral format.
JasperAnalysis OLAP Workbench is another new project that supports graphical OLAP cube and query design for JasperAnalysis. The Workbench is a tool for easily managing OLAP metadata and queries for Jasper Analysis, including a graphical OLAP schema designer and graphical MDX query designer. The resulting cube and query definitions can then be used by business users to perform simple but powerful analysis of even large quantities of multi-dimensional data stored in standard RDBMS systems.
Integration between iReport and JasperServer usability has been improved by assisting report developers who need to create complex reports containing subreports and by ensuring report naming rules are followed.
SOA Web Services Integration has been further extended to offer support for report scheduling and running localized reports via Web Services. For example, web services may now be used to perform common tasks like scheduling a report to be run at specific calendar intervals, deleting a previously scheduled job, or running the same report in English, Japanese, or other languages and locales.
Custom Data Sources are now easier to implement to provide support for unusual or legacy data sources, as well as to implement custom business logic in the queries for reports.
JSR-168 Portal Support is now available with an included open source portal server and JSR-168 compliant portlets for interacting with the repository (the report manager) and for running reports within the bundled or an external portal. The portlets include support for single-sign on, selecting reports, pagination and parameter input controls. The portlets integrate with JasperServer via SOA Web Services, allowing loosely coupled integration between JasperServer and a portal server in any environment.
JasperETL Java Code Generation now better supports the Java development community through the option to generate the ETL job code in Java, in addition to existing support for Perl.
JasperETL Enhanced Native Database Support has been further extended with new Oracle and MySQL database-specific ETL components and bulk loader support, as well as the ability to "push-down" operations to the RDBMS server with new E-LT components. This enables organizations to more efficiently utilize investments in specific RDBMS products and server hardware.
About JasperSoft Corporation
JasperSoft is the market leader in open source business intelligence (BI). With more than 3 million downloads worldwide and more than 8,000 commercial customers in 96 countries, JasperSoft offers the most widely used open source business intelligence software in the world. The JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite is comprised of an interactive reporting server, graphical and ad hoc report design interfaces, OLAP analysis, an ETL tool for data integration, and a Java reporting library for use with either stand-alone or embedded business intelligence applications. JasperSoft is based in San Francisco and is backed by leading venture capital firms Morgenthaler Ventures, DCM, Partech International, Scale Venture Partners and SAP Ventures. More information is available at www.jaspersoft.com and www.jasperforge.org.
(Submitted by Sharon Smith of )
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