Brian Gentile is Sr. Vice President & General Manager of the TIBCO Analytics Product Group within TIBCO Software. Formerly, he was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Jaspersoft, which was acquired by TIBCO in April 2014. 

The modern demands of a new data velocity spectrum are becoming clearer each month, as more organizations recognize the newfound responsibility of using data to create more value.

There is more data available today than ever to put to work driving sales, saving costs, creating loyal customers or greater efficiency – in short, building more value. To put more data to work, an organization needs a plan. This plan should be based on deep knowledge of the needed business uses of the data. Mostly, an organization should keenly understand how quickly it must put data to work in order to create value. Enter the New Data Velocity Spectrum, which recognizes that some data needs to be put to work instantly while other data needs curation time, rich definition and dimension in order to unlock its value.

I believe that, during 2015, an understanding of this New Data Velocity Spectrum will become mainstream. Further, during this next year, even more technological options will exist for an organization of any size to be successful at any point across this spectrum.

How Fast Does the Data Need to be Put to Work?

If the primary goal is speed of putting the data to work, because the data would become stale otherwise, the primary value comes from “transaction-ality” of the data – and the information architecture should reflect that need for speed. If the primary goal is richness of the data so that they can be defined broadly and used flexibly across a variety of analytic uses, the primary value comes from the “dimension-ality” of the data and the information architecture should reflect that need for richness and definition.

In the past, we tried to build analytic information systems with portions of this spectrum in mind . . . at least the portion we could solve for with readily available technology. And, in the past, even the best practice uses of these technologies involved clear trade-offs. Often, rich, multi-dimensional query environments were constructed completely off-line and with data that had been substantially transformed (think ETL, if you’re a data warehouser). Or, real-time data feeds, probably using Enterprise Service Bus technology, populated special-purpose operational dashboards that enabled a variety of decisions and with low latency. In either case, wherever persistence was needed, the underlying data storage workhorse has been the relational database management system (RDBMS).

For the past twenty-five years, RDBMS technology has broadly served the available spectrum of data velocity, acting as the underlying data construct for practically every transactional and analytic use. As the need for rich data increases (dimensionality), data warehouses technologies were built on top of the classic RDBMS, imposing new indexing systems, stored procedures and optimized query processors. The ultimate thirst for dimension-ality has been historically quenched with an OLAP engine, which has also been popularly built atop the standard RDBMS, becoming “ROLAP” (with the obvious and popular exception of Essbase). So, for nearly three decades, the answer has been an RDBMS. Now, what was the question?

The Most Modern Technologies

Of course, our reliance on this single relational database engine has lessened recently as we now have a much wider set of fast-growing alternatives, each better suited to a portion of the Data Velocity Spectrum now necessary in so many organizations.

To better address our need for “transaction-ality” or the speed of data, modern streaming technologies are now commonly supplementing modern database tools, delivering constant, immediate access to data feeds from any data source or type. Technologies such as Apache Storm, Amazon’s AWS Kinesis, and TIBCO’s Streambase provide immediate access and processing of data feeds from nearly any data source or type. Today, streaming data feeds power both transactional and analytic uses of data, enabling (for example) relevant rules to be established where real-time results trigger insight that leads to fraud detection, security monitoring, service route optimization, and trade clearing all around the world.

Further, our one database choice has exploded into many, as a variety of NoSQL data stores are emerging successfully. From key value stores (Redis, Cassandra) and document-oriented databases (MongoDB, CouchDB), to Big Table structures (HBase), Graph Databases (Neo4J) and in-memory database caches and engines (TIBCO ActiveSpaces, Gemfire) – the choices are many, powerful and can be complex. But, choice is good because we’re better serving the specialty business needs across this New Data Velocity Spectrum.

To better address our need for “dimension-ality” and recognize the need for so many new, high-volume, multi-structured data types, in many ways Hadoop has become the new Data Warehouse, complete with its array of sub-processing components. All the while. the combination of a massively parallel analytic database (Vertica, Netezza, Greenplum) and a modern, in-memory-based business analytics platform (TIBCO Jaspersoft, TIBCO Spotfire) now often replace most of the functionality of traditional OLAP technologies at a fraction of the time and cost. Solving for rich definition and dimensions in data has never been easier or less expensive.

It is a bold, new world. The winners are both the business users and the technology professionals because modern, special purpose technologies are fast arriving to address the growing needs across The New Data Velocity Spectrum. In 2015, matching the right information architecture and the best available technology to the specific business need on this Spectrum will become commonplace. Just in time to compete more successfully.

Figure 1: The Data Velocity Spectrum. How fast does the data need to be put to work?

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To say that the big data market is thriving would be an understatement. The IDC predicted that the big data sector would be worth $16.1 billion by the close of the year, growing six times faster than the wider IT market. When you consider one single company, Micros, was bought out by Oracle for a dazzling $5.3 billion this year, the IDC’s estimate may even be slightly on the conservative side.

Mergers and acquisitions were active throughout the year, across a range of industries and verticals. Yet at Dataconomy’s news desk, we noticed five key trends in the acquisitions space which came up time and time again. If you’re looking to get a foothold on this market, investing in one of these five areas- or even starting your own enterprise within them- seems like a solid bet for the near future.

1. Cloud Computing

Some are hailing cloud as the latest IT revolution, others are dismissing it due to the immaturity of the technology. A recent survey of UK IT Professionals by Reconnix found only 8% had currently adopted cloud technologies, with only 10% more considering their business “ready” for cloud adoption.Regardless of the divide in opinion, many of the biggest names in IT- including Microsoft, Oracle & VMWare– have been quick to snap up cloud computing startups and increase their product line.

2. Data Security

Undoubtedly, the biggest pain point to wider cloud adoption is security concerns. With everyone from big business to celebrities reeling from the fallout of data breaches this year, data security has undoubtedly been a hot topic, which has been reflected within the acquisitions space. Microsoft bought Aorato; Cloudera bolstered their Enterprise Data Hub with the acquisition of Gazzang; Facebook brought PrivateCore in-house to fortify their defences. Google alone acquired no less than three data security startups this year. The intersection between data security and cloud computing became a hot market of its own, with IBM purchasing CrossIdeas and Lighthouse- hopefully, off-premise storage with airtight security will quell doubts and lead to wider cloud adoption.

3. Image Recognition

Neural networks have undoubtedly flourished within the past couple of years, with the task of image recognition in particular seeing astounding improvements. Pinterest bought out VisualGraph, Twitter acquired MadBits, and Google snapped up three deep learning/image recognition teams: DNNResearch, Jetpac and Vision Factory. We spoke earlier in the year to Cloudera’s Sean Owen about the trend, and why he thought there was so much movement in what seems to be a very specific corner of a much wider machine learning market:

We’ve got a small group of people without a real product to sell, but that they have a very interesting take on a hot topic in research, like deep learning or multi-layered convolutional neural nets. Interestingly all of these small start-ups have managed to make deep learning do something related to image recognition. It’s not surprising that image classification is a problem the tech giants have, so it’s not surprising that they want to buy these technologies at almost any price. In a way I’m not sure this is reflective of a lot of trends in machine learning and in the industry, even if these are the most visible transactions in this space. All of these seem to be of a similar pattern – tech giants buying a deep learning start-up, of a couple people, to enhance some kind of image recognition capability. It’s interesting, but it’s not what 90% of companies out there do when they do machine learning.

 

4. BI and Analytics

Hardly a new or surprising entry on this list, but innovation in the BI and Analytics space is still going strong. The main buyers were tech companies in the data processing & analysis space, bolstering their respective offerings with the latest analytical capabilities. As such, Cloudera incorporated Datapad; Teradata added Think Big Analytics, and TIBCO added Jaspersoft– with TIBCO themselves having just been acquired by Vista Equity Partners this week.

5. Database Tech

Although technologies in the data capture and processing space have been innovating and flourishing for many years, some of the larger players are still acquiring startups at the cutting edge of this field to ameliorate their existing offerings. IBM acquired Cloudant back in the first quarter. Teradata have again been active in this field, buying out Revelytix and Hadapt, the latter of which focuses on SQL-on-Hadoop. With wider demand for real-time and operational analytics, it’s a safe bet that we can expect to see further SQL-on-Hadoop acquisitions (or adoptions of Spark, Storm and Flink) in the coming year.

As with every year, 2014 proved that with innovation comes acquisition. It’s difficult to predict where the next great IT evolution will spring from, but the future looks good for these five spheres heading into 2015.

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(Image credits:- Pixabay, Continuent; Garret Heath; Shutterstock; Datapad; See-Ming Lee)

TIBCO Software Inc. announced today a new offering on AWS Marketplace, TIBCO Spotfire® for AWS. Users will now be able to use Spotfire® data visualization and dashboards technology on an hourly, pay-as-you-go basis for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Redshift and more. 

Spotfire for AWS provides technology professionals with easy access to the Spotfire. The installation and launch process is automated so that technologists can easily evaluate how the Spotfire server-side components can be configured for proof-of-concepts and ad hoc projects with Spotfire Server, Web Player, and Automation Services.

“As the market shifts gear, we see a series of tipping points in 2014 that will accelerate adoption, but it may come from a different place,” said Dan Sommer, research director, Gartner. “These tipping points are that half of BI and analytics spend will be business driven, half of new license spend will be driven by data discovery requirements, and half of organizations will consider deploying BI in the cloud, at least tactically.”

“Expanding the TIBCO Analytics offering on AWS Marketplace to include Spotfire puts the power of an analytics and data visualization leader within easy reach of Amazon Redshift customers, starting at less than one dollar per hour,” said Karl Van den Bergh, Vice President, Product and Customer Success, TIBCO Analytics.

“We are excited that the Jaspersoft platform has been successfully received on AWS Marketplace by embracing the hourly pay-as-you-go model, and we are happy to have Spotfire as a new offering,” said Terry Hanold, Vice President, AWS Platform and Marketplace, Amazon Web Services, Inc.

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Press Release: TIBCO, a global leader in infrastructure and business intelligence software, today unveiled its vision for the TIBCO Analytics platform, and previewed new solutions and updates for TIBCO Spotfire® and TIBCO Jaspersoft®. TIBCO detailed how it will make enterprise data accessible more quickly to all users, wherever they are, and in whatever application they are working. The TIBCO Analytics platform is able to achieve this through the combined solutions of its fast, easy-to-use data visualization capabilities from Spotfire®, along with contextual insight through embedded reporting and analytics (BI) from Jaspersoft®.

“In order to succeed, modern organizations must move at unprecedented velocity. Having access to actionable data that is contextually relevant, and delivered in real time, is critical to being nimble, proactive and allowing all business users to make better decisions,” Brian Gentile, senior vice president and general manager, TIBCO Analytics. “With the combined power of Jaspersoft and Spotfire, TIBCO is uniquely positioned to utilize deep understanding of the data analytics market to deliver simple, fast, and elegant solutions to empower end-user through data.”

The following advancements are being delivered by TIBCO Analytics, and will be available to new and existing customers by the end of 2014:

• TIBCO Jaspersoft 6: This update to the Jaspersoft platform includes a new dashboard designer that gives developers a faster and easier way to build and deploy dashboards using a new version of its innovative embeddable BI framework — called Visualize.js. Now developers can quickly build and embed interactive reports and dashboards inside their application, using the control and simplicity of JavaScript.

• TIBCO Spotfire® Cloud Update: TIBCO introduced TIBCO Spotfire® Recommendations, the new intelligent analytics recommendation engine designed for business users who need to analyze data, but are not experts in analytics techniques. Spotfire® Recommendations delivers the correct visualization the first time to speed decision-making, and eliminate the trial-and-error process associated with other suggestion-based solutions. 

• Spotfire and Jaspersoft Interoperability: Over time, TIBCO customers will be able to increasingly combine the power of the Jaspersoft business intelligence platform with the data visualization capabilities of Spotfire. Early examples of interoperability include broadening the reach of insight from Spotfire through Jaspersoft’s reporting platform and enriching Jaspersoft reports with Spotfire GeoAnalytics’ map-based visualizations.

• Spotfire on AWS Marketplace: TIBCO Spotfire will be available through AWS Marketplace, giving users data visualization in a pay-as-you-go basis for Amazon Redshift and more. In addition, the Jaspersoft business intelligence platform on AWS Marketplace adds a new annual subscription with professional support to complement its popular hourly service. 

• TIBCO® Metrics: Announcing the beta program for a new cloud-based TIBCO Metrics offering, which delivers personalized key performance indicators (KPIs) for every decision maker in an organization and viewable on any device. Delivered as a cloud service, TIBCO Metrics will make it simple to author, monitor and manage business metrics.

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Press Release: TIBCO, a global leader in infrastructure and business intelligence software,today announced the open source release of version 5.6 of its award-winning TIBCO Jaspersoft^® business intelligence platform, available for free download on the Jaspersoft® Community site. This new version includes several product updates, including new Big Data connectors, interactive reporting upgrades, an updated OLAP engine, and performance enhancements to TIBCO Jaspersoft® Studio. In addition, the company announced that more than 450,000 users have registered with the community, which hosts more than 150,000 unique visitors per month.

“Jaspersoft was originally founded as a result of an open source project, and we’re proud to maintain that mentality and commitment to keeping our business intelligence platform available to the public as a community version,” said Brian Gentile, senior vice president and general manager, TIBCO Analytics. “We strongly believe that the Jaspersoft Community is responsible for much of our success and continued growth, and enables our software to be available to everyone from students learning to leverage BI to multi-national corporations requiring enterprise grade solutions through a competitive pricing model.”

New product features added to the Jaspersoft Community platform include:

–          Native Big Data connectors adding support for Apache Hadoop®, Apache Hive™, Apache Cassandra™, and Cloudera®, helping to deliver real-time reporting on your Big Data investment

–          Additional interactive reporting features to provide a more customizable experience for users. New capabilities such as the interactive zoom, string search, and bookmarking help make the interaction of reports a more intuitive and powerful experience

–          An updated OLAP engine that now provides faster queries to data with a series of core stability improvements for a more robust analytic offering

–          Jaspersoft Studio performance enhancements that enable developers to work and iterate their reports more swiftly and reliably 

Additional Resources:

• Download the Cloud BI white paper
• Learn more about TIBCO Jaspersoft® for AWS
• Purchase TIBCO Jaspersoft on AWS Marketplace, starting at less than $1 per hour, on a pay-as-you-go basis with no extra charges for users or data. Jaspersoft has more than a 1,000 active customers on AWS Marketplace
• Visit http://community.jaspersoft.com for more information about the TIBCO Jaspersoft open source community
• Follow @Jaspersoft and @TIBCO on Twitter to stay up-to-date on all of the company’s latest news and product information
• AWS Test Drive Program

(Image credit: Tibco)

Palo Alto, CA, July 1, 2014 – TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX) today announced that Kony, Inc., a leading enterprise mobility company, is using TIBCO Jaspersoft® for Amazon Web Services to achieve embedded analytics within its mobile platform. Jaspersoft^®, the “Intelligence Inside” applications and business processes, is used by Kony and its customers to monitor, report, and analyze the deployment of mobile applications. With Jaspersoft, Kony has been able to deploy mobile analytics offerings in weeks instead of months, and significantly increase time to value.

Kony has a long-established history of enabling large enterprises to define, design, develop, test, deploy, and manage multi-channel applications within a unified product set. Kony chose Jaspersoft to deliver the highest quality business intelligence services that top enterprises need to execute their mission critical applications. The Jaspersoft software enabled Kony to complete the initial rollout of its mobile analytics offering within four weeks compared to alternate solutions evaluated that were estimated to take three months. Subsequent releases provide new reports and functionality in five days, compared to four weeks required by other solutions.

“We initially considered developing our reporting capabilities in-house, but it ultimately became burdensome to maintain, and that approach could only take us so far in terms of features and time to value,” said Matthew Terry, vice president, product management, Kony, Inc. “Jaspersoft enabled us to deliver high-quality reporting and analytics within our multi-channel application development platform, while easily integrating the output within our own look and feel.”

By deploying the Jaspersoft BI capabilities on Amazon Web Services in conjunction with the Amazon Redshift data warehousing solution, Kony eliminated the need for in-house infrastructure. Kony also benefitted from the strong RESTful software interfaces in Jaspersoft, which enabled tight integration into their existing systems allowing easier data analysis and faster report building.

“Crucially, the Jaspersoft RESTful integration was as easy and powerful as advertised. It provided both the rapid data analysis and the rich presentation layer flexibility our enterprise customers expect,” said Terry. “Many times, when we integrate with analytical RESTful services, they only provide the raw data. With Jaspersoft, the service also provided interactive presentation artifacts we could directly reuse within our own application. This enabled us to maintain a unified look and feel for our customers and avoid having to rebuild the reporting presentation layer.”

“Kony required a highly flexible business intelligence solution for their customers to easily analyze data from their mobile and desktop applications, and generate standard and custom reports faster than in-house deployment or other software products,” said Karl Van den Bergh, senior vice president, products and customer success, TIBCO Jaspersoft. “With Jaspersoft, Kony benefits from a powerful and responsive solution that can easily integrate with their existing applications, all while enjoying a cost-effective model that fits their needs.”

Additional Resources:

• See Kony’s Jaspersoft Solution in Action
• Download the Cloud BI white paper
• Learn more about TIBCO Jaspersoft for AWS
• Purchase Jaspersoft for AWS, starting at less than $1 per hour, with no extra charges for users or data
• See Jaspersoft in action on Amazon EMR
• Visit http://community.jaspersoft.com for more information about the Jaspersoft open source community
• Follow @Jaspersoft and @TIBCO on Twitter to stay up-to-date on all of the company’s latest news and product information
• Learn more about Kony’s solution and application analytics

About TIBCO
TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX) is a global leader in infrastructure and business intelligence software. Whether it’s optimizing inventory, cross-selling products, or averting crisis before it happens, TIBCO uniquely delivers the Two-Second Advantage® — the ability to capture the right information at the right time and act on it preemptively for a competitive advantage. With a broad mix of innovative products and services, TIBCO is the strategic technology partner trusted by businesses around the world. Learn more about TIBCO at www.tibco.com.

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TIBCO,Jaspersoft, Two-Second Advantage and TIBCO Software are trademarks or registered trademarks of TIBCO Software Inc. and/or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. Amazon Web Services, AWS, and Amazon Redshift are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries.  All other product and company names and marks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.

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So far in the “Understanding Big Data” series, we’ve looked at what “big data” actually means; what the big data landscape looks like; and some of the infrastructural approaches you might look into when you’re taking the first tentative steps away from the data warehouse. In this edition, we’ll be examining different analytics platforms- how they work, what opportunities they offer enterprises, and how they differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Around the turn of the millennium, most enterprises had turned to modern business applications to offer them insights. Companies had been implementing CRM and ERP systems to capture data, and the rise of  parallel processing techniques made data storage and processing cheaper and quicker than ever before. But garnering this data was not, in itself, helpful- this data had to be analysed to be of any value. That’s where analytics platforms come in.

Analytics Platforms

Guavus; source

At their core, analytics platforms harness the data and transform it into something comprehensible for the end user. They transform the data into reports and analytics dashboards which companies can use to fuel decisions and optimise their services. The most powerful tools in this field pull in multi-structured data from multiple sources and delivers actionable insights in real time. Some big names in this field include:

• Guavus- Guavus provide an end-to-end view across operations in real time. Guavus is capable of processing over 2.5 petabytes of data a day- that’s equivalent to 250 billion records a day, or 2.5 million records a second.
• Datameer- Datameer markets itself as the only end-to-end big data analytics application purpose-built for Hadoop. Datameer takes your multivarious data spread across the cloud, legacy databases and spreadsheets and helps you to integrate it all into Hadoop. It also allows you the option to choose whether you want a one-time input or continuous integration as new data comes in. You can then analyse and visualise your data from a single source.

Business Intelligence Platforms

Pentaho; source

In 1958, IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn employed the Webster’s dictionary definition of intelligence to discuss Business Intelligence: “the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal”. The same holds true for Business Intelligence tools today; presenting the interrelationships between data in such a way that it illuminates decision-making and pushes enterprises forward. Companies developing tools within this field include:

• Jaspersoft- Computer Weekly described Jaspersoft as “business intelligence on the cheap”- whilst this might not sound like the most favourable review, Jaspersoft’s open source offerings have proved extremely popular. As well as open-source, Jaspersoft provide commercial products, support and service. Some of their unique features include mobile compability, integration with Google, MongoDB, Cassandra and Hadoop, and cloud BI for less than a dollar an hour.
• Pentaho- The Pentaho model also offers a community and enterprise offerings. Jaspersoft’s and Pentaho’s models are fairly similiar, but Jaspersoft is said to be stronger in terms of reports and community support, and Pentaho is more adept at OLAP analysis and dashboards.
• Birst- In our interview with Southard Jones, Birst’s VP of Product Strategy, he defined his product like this: “The key to Birst is the ability of our product to automate the hardest part of BI – which is all of the raw, ugly, un cleansed data that is all over your organisation and is multiplying at insane rates )[…] In essence, we create a business library that appeals to the way a business person thinks about their business.” One of their most recent innovations was introducing support for SAP HANA.
• SiSense- SiSense markets itself as the database which allows “non-techies” to “skip the data preparation nightmare” by combining data sources into a single repository. It allows users to drag-and-drop data from sources such as Excel, Google AdWords and Analytics and CRM information, and move quickly and painlessly to analytics and visualisation.

Visualisations

Tableau: source

Visualisation involves taking the raw data and presenting it in complex, multi-dimensional visual formats to illuminate the information. Although many analytics programmes offer visualisation as part of their product, some companies primarily focused on visualisation include:

• Tableau- As easy-to-use tool which allows you to drag and drop elements to create visualisations on the fly, and is accessible for users of all skill levels. It also promises speeds up to 10 times faster than those of traditional Business Intelligence tools. They also have a Cloud version, and can scale from small companies to enterprises with tens of thousands of employees, who can all use and modify the visualisations.
• Visual.ly- Visual.ly is a community platform for data visualisation and graphics. As well as a gallery of user-designed infographics, their in-house design team build a range of ad-hoc infographics, including analytics.

There are a dazzling range of analytics solutions out there, from free offerings capable of giving basic analytics in real time to programmes that can produce complex visualisations of immense datasets. In the next installment of “Understanding Big Data”, we’ll be looking at Machine Learning- moving from understanding patterns in the data you have to predicting trends you may encounter in the future.

(Image credit: Birst)

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Eileen McNulty-Holmes – Editor

Eileen has five years’ experience in journalism and editing for a range of online publications. She has a degree in English Literature from the University of Exeter, and is particularly interested in big data’s application in humanities. She is a native of Shropshire, United Kingdom.

Email: eileen@dataconomy.ru

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On Tuesday, TIBCO Software announced that more than 1,000 active customers have subscribed to the “pay-as-you-go” TIBCO Jaspersoft for AWS. The company also announced the general availability of its newly released Jaspersoft 5.6 on Amazon Web Services Marketplace.

“Jaspersoft 5.6′s improved Big Data capabilities, increased performance and Visualize.js JavaScript API, combined with the 1,000-customer milestone, further solidifies Jaspersoft as a leading cloud-based BI suite on AWS Marketplace,” the company said in a statement. “In addition, customers can benefit from virtualized blending of relational and Big Data sources such as MongoDB, Hadoop and Cassandra, as well as more powerful analytic calculations and visualizations.”

The growing popularity of pay-by-the-hour BI tools shows a shift in the market, and is indeed a significant factor contributing to the growth of Jaspersoft for AWS. Rather than a company establishing its own servers, databases, ETL and BI tools, the cloud offers the option of renting these as a service. It appeals to large and small organizations alike, not only because of the reasonably low pricing plans, but also because it adds the benefit of being scalable.

“Adding more than 1,000 customers in little over a year, we have disrupted the Business Intelligence market,” said Karl Van den Bergh, vice president, product and customer success, TIBCO Jaspersoft. “Customers love our Cloud BI service because they get a full reporting and analytics suite for just cents per hour that they can deploy in minutes.”

Jaspersoft for AWS  starts at less than a dollar per hour with no extra data or user charges.

Read more here

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We spoke with Brian Gentile, the CEO of Jaspersoft, ahead of the new release of TIBCO Jaspersoft’s 5.6 Platform. Version 5.6 of the Jaspersoft BI platform is designed to help more business users become capably analytic, with advances in key areas such as Big Data connectivity, platform performance, analytics and reporting.

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Earlier this month, TIBCO Jaspersoft’s 5.6 platform was announced. Can you tell us more about this release?

Absolutely. We have added a number of new features to our server and our recording tools and this is one breakthrough that we are very excited about.

So let me just describe what’s in the new version. It’s about improved big data connectivity and about genuinely using big data in a way that makes it small and malleable. There are a whole host of new features that are built for big data connectivity and use. Moreover, there is a new set of analytic strengths and computational capabilities that we didn’t have before that are incredibly useful to the person who’s probably paid to be analytical, to build formulas and calculations that others can use. We’ve built an entirely new way to create calculations and have advanced our interactive reporting capabilities – we’ve long been great at creating intelligent reports that allow the users to manipulate and interact with the data that’s visible in charts and graphs and tables and we’ve done more of this.

So the new product version has this big data improvement adding all this access to big data sources, which obviously requires us to be even better at expanding the amount of mathematics you can apply to the data. To enable this, we built a new facility for allowing analysts to create their own calculations. Similar in Excel, there’s a formula generator where you can point and click with operators, Boolean and non-Boolean – we’ve mimicked that in our tool. There are 30 defined mathematical functions and you can combine them in almost any order; and then you can save that and name that calculation for shared or future use. We think that’s just another logical thing to want to do with all these new data types.

We keep expanding the number of charts and graphs:  people have an insatiable desire for visualising data, so we support things like bubble charts and scatterplots, and dual axis pie or dual level pies, a spider aka radar chart, heat maps and so on. All these different chart types are now part of the product as well.

We have also improved the performance of the back-end query processing, the front-end, the way that the images get built more quickly on any device, small screen or large, the time it takes to create the graphs and pictures for the end user.

Will TIBCO’s recent acquisition Jaspersoft impact your product roadmap, open-source strategy, or pricing model?  And how does Jaspersoft really benefit from this acquisition?

So generally the answer is, business as usual for Jaspersoft, especially in the near term.  The last thing we want to do in combining with TIBCO is distract from the growth and success we’ve had. That means in the near term we are a distinct product group within TIBCO, and our direction and our products and road map are completely maintained intact. Our contract with our customers is unchanged, our commitment to subscription pricing is unchanged. High-value, low-cost, all this is unchanged.

TIBCO sees this as an enormous advantage to them; TIBCO as an organisation wants to grow its influence and its footprint beyond the largest enterprises and into a much larger market where technologies like analytics are being consumed much more quickly, at much lower cost, with on-demand cloud models. These are all the reasons that TIBCO was attracted to Jaspersoft.

So changing any of that would be a mistake.

With over 16 million downloads, Jaspersoft is the most widely employed BI software’s today.  But with fast penetration of other BI companies, like Tableau and Birst, will Jaspersoft be able to maintain its leadership?

At Jaspersoft, we have three axes of innovation – open source, the architecture we have built on top of, and our business model. In other words, we’ve chosen to take our open source roots and our open web standard technical architecture, and point it at the market where it can gain the greatest leverage.

As such, out of all the statistics that I can be proud of – the 16 million downloads, the 400,000 registered members – maybe the one I’m most proud of is the fact that every day there are millions of people’s lives that are touched by Jaspersoft’s products because we are built into so many other products. An estimated 140,000 other applications around the globe built us into their product. The fact that we can touch so many lives with a BI tool is maybe the most distinguishing of all.

As successful as Tableau has been, and SAS-based tools like Birst, we believe the power of those three axes combined are substantial and we think the best influence and the best success is still far ahead. All that we’ve accomplished so far is going to be dwarfed by what will happen in the next five to ten years. We think those will be the most fun.

Business intelligence today is one of the fastest growing industries.  What do you think is the future of BI and where is the industry heading?

Economically speaking, If you think about what’s happened in business intelligence and analytics in the last seven years, we’ve seen an explosion of investment, private equity, venture funding, seed angel funds. All of these have come together and created an almost unprecedented number of new analytics focused companies. It’s unsustainable; there are too many to even keep a track of.  We joke about it inside Jaspersoft “here’s the new competitor of the week”. Everyone apparently thinks that they can do analytics because that’s what it looks like. While this will clearly generate some good ideas, not all these companies are going to make it. Many of them are going to fail, or be acquired, and so on along the path.

We think that the tipping point has probably already been reached, so when this opportunity came to us, to be acquired, the strategic interest was around being at the front of what will likely be a new round of consolidation. Economically, you want to be at the front-end of that curve, not the back-end of that curve.  I’d like to think that in five to seven years we’ll look back at when TIBCO acquired Jaspersoft as marking the beginning of a new phase of consolidation and analytics where all these smaller companies, small and in many cases much smaller than Jaspersoft, began to either be acquired, or combined, and so on.  So I think it’s inevitable that that’s what will happen in the next seven years or so, and this is just the beginning of that.

At Jaspersoft for the past 5 years, Brian Gentile has worked deeply in Big Data and Cloud Computing as key technology elements of the company’s commercial open source development and distribution model.  In that time, Jaspersoft has become the open source business intelligence software market leader, measured by commercial success and growth, production deployments of its software, the size and vibrancy of its community, and product downloads.

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Big data has been a focus for many companies in the past few years and the market is expected to grow further at a compound annual growth rate of 32 percent in the next four years. However, according to Mark Quinn, CTO of software provider TIBCO, big data analytics relies too much on historic data and has failed to match the speed companies require to make quick decisions.

At the TIBCO Transform event in Paris, Quinn told delegates that a shift in outlook is required; big data is not as relevant as ‘fast data’, a term coined to describe a different approach to analytics.

“The challenge with big data is that it has not gained relevance to your everyday life and to the operational decisions you are making on a daily basis,” Quinn said.

“It may improve things, or point out inefficiencies in your business model, and it may point out opportunities, but the problem is that you are finding a needle in a haystack once.”

“What ‘fast data’ is all about is being able to find the needle in a haystack again and again, based on unique circumstances and the context in real-time, at that particular moment of interaction.”

For TIBCO, the future of big data is fixed with real-time analysis. As such, the fast data idea means combining data from a range of business systems – from business applications to cloud services and mobile devices – and bringing these together to perform event processes and analytics to deliver meaningful information to companies. “Given today’s pace of change in business, the ability to act in context right now is more important than seeing that you should have done something different six months later,” Quinn added.

Interestingly, Quinn carefully pointed out that fast data will not replace big data, but that it is the “next step in the evolution and revolution that was started with big data.”

Over the next few months and years, we should expect TIBCO to follow with this line of reasoning. In April, the company bought business intelligence provider Jaspersoft for $185 million, and is expected to expand its focus beyond traditional application integration products and into events processing, analytics, social and data vizualisation.

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(Image Credit: Paul Downey)

Accessibility has been the flavour of the week, with several big names making announcements which will shake up the analytics market and put greater focus on making tools easier to use.

The main announcement was Facebook’s decision to open source Haxl. Written in Haskell, Haxl is an internally-developed library which makes it easier to pull data from multiple sources. Haxl acts as an abstraction between front-end applications and back-end databases and web services. It allows users to execute a single query across multiple sources, and caches the queries for future use.

Jaspersoft have also been making waves in accessibility. The recent release of Jaspersoft 5.6 placed alot of focus on blending sources (particularly relational/non-relational), and using enhanced connectors to do away with manual integration. As we reported last week, they’ve also announced a new visualisation product, visualise.js, which allows for better embedding of visualisations and support for new chart types.

SiSense also announced $30 million in funding. The money will go towards expansion of the product line and pushing for the adoption of their namesake product, which aims to make large-scale analytics easier to use for traditional enterprises. This is achieved by their columnar database, which utilises CPU cache, RAM or disk depending on what is most appropriate for the task, improving performance and reducing hardware requirements.

The move towards greater accessibility is growing trend; hopefully, this will lead to more enterprises being capable of using big data analytics, and gaining greater insights as a result.

Read more here.
(Image credit: Jaspersoft)

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Press release: TIBCO Software Inc. today announced that its Jaspersoft® group, creating the ”Intelligence Inside” applications and business processes, has released Visualize.js, a JavaScript framework for advanced embedding of visualizations and reports in applications. The new framework, which is available with the newly released TIBCO Jaspersoft 5.6 platform, delivers more control, simplicity and power for application developers by combining the power of the complete Jaspersoft analytic server with the simplicity and control of JavaScript. In addition to Visualize.js, Jaspersoft introduced a series of updates to its flagship platform. Version 5.6 of the Jaspersoft platform includes virtualized blending of relational and Big Data sources such as MongoDB, Hadoop and Cassandra, more powerful analytic calculations and visualizations, and new interactive reporting features.

Visualize.js

With Visualize.js, anyone building a web application can more easily include powerful analytics as an integrated experience. Developers can now embed highly interactive visualizations and reports with more control and power than previously available using iFrames, charting libraries or other BI vendor solutions. Visualize.js leverages the REST APIs of JasperReports® Server for built-in services such as data connectivity, repository access, in-memory analytics, and visualization design. Visualize.js ushers in the next generation of embedded analytic platforms with its on-premises or cloud deployment options, low-cost subscription or utility pricing, and comprehensive feature set which delivers unmatched control and simplicity.

Early Visualize.js user, Raj Chary, vice president of technology and architecture at Triumph Learning, noted, “Our Web-based application, GET Waggle, makes it simple for teachers and school administrators to track and measure students’ progress and growth on skills and standards. Data visualizations and analytics are a key component of our product platform, and the ability to take immediate actions on key metrics makes it a very powerful tool for our users. We needed visualizations in our product to be a delightful, not a daunting experience. Jaspersoft, with Visualize.js, provided a very rich way to integrate and build reports. This allowed us to easily embed the full power of the platform into GET Waggle to create an experience that makes the data actionable for our users.”

Jaspersoft 5.6

Version 5.6 of the Jaspersoft BI platform is designed to help more business users become capably analytic, with advances in key areas such as Big Data connectivity, platform performance, analytics and reporting. In summary, the new features in version 5.6 include:

• Federated query connectors to virtually blend relational data with data from companies such as MongoDB, Hadoop or Cassandra;
• Improved native connectors for direct access to companies such as MongoDB, Hadoop and Cassandra for real-time reporting;
• New analytic calculations and functions allow users to build their own algorithms for more advanced analysis of data;
• New chart types including spider, bubble, and dual-level pie charts; and
• Enhanced interactive reporting functionality, including improved zoom and search capabilities.

“More than ever, analytics is now a thing that you do and not a place that you go,” said Brian Gentile, senior vice president and general manager, TIBCO Jaspersoft. “The Jaspersoft 5.6 platform advancements, when combined with the new Visualize.js framework, enable any web application to seamlessly embed and control advanced analytic functionality. This enables just the right amount of data — no more and no less — to be presented directly in an application, making everyone more capably analytic.”

(Image credit: Jaspersoft)

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Press Release: Tibco Software Inc. today announced that CRN Magazine has named Jaspersoft to the “Big Data 100” list in the “Big Data Business Analytics” category. The comprehensive list recognizes businesses that create innovative tools and technologies that help organizations manage, process, and analyze the rapidly increasing volume of information generated in a meaningful and productive way.

“Channel partners are deluged with choices when it comes to selecting the technology they use as building blocks for big data solutions, making it critical to have a trusted resource that can be used to identify the most cutting-edge technologies and tools available,” said Robert Faletra, chief executive officer of CRN Magazine’s parent company, The Channel Company. “Being a part of the CRN 2014 Big Data 100 is an industry-wide recognition of these vendors’ dedication and innovation to meeting the big data challenge.”

Jaspersoft embedded analytics enable channel partners to embed data analytics and reporting features into their customers’ most-used applications. Joint customers are able to take advantage of a broad range of data access strategies, including native real-time reporting and analysis, data blending of NoSQL and relational sources using an innovative data virtualization layer, and batch analysis using data integration. Customers can choose one or more access techniques to combine with a variety of visualizations to present the right insight to the right user.

“Being selected for the Big Data 100 for the second consecutive year is a testament to Jaspersoft’s disruptive approach to the big data analytics industry,” said Brian Gentile, senior vice president and general manager, TIBCO Jaspersoft. “The solution we’ve built enables our channel partners to provide fully embedded analytics capabilities for their customers’ existing applications. This recognition is also a strong validation of the growing demand for business analytics accessible not only to data scientists, but to the business users within organizations.”

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Tibeco announced yesterday that it has acquired Jaspersoft, a company specialising in open source business intelligence tools, for $185 million. The new deal will give Tibco a larger, more diverse BI suite to sell alongside its existing Spotfire analytics product. Jaspersoft’s integration with numerous NoSQL data stores and Hadoop will give Tibco the chance to cover the whole of the market opportunity for analytics.

According to Forrester Research vice president and principal analyst Boris Evelson, Tibco’s acquisition of Jaspersoft is a wise move.

“Spotfire is an analytics-only product. It a) does not do pixel-perfect reporting (like customer statements, invoices, bills, etc).” Nor does Spotfire have an extract, transform and load (ETL) component. “ETL prepares data for analysis and use in BI.”

(Source: Gigaom)

The news of Tibco’s acquisition is a sign of the difficulty companies are having in differentiating themselves in an extremely competitive market. According to a report by Gigaom (see above), Jaspersoft is behind other emerging companies in terms of mindshare (6 percent compared with Tableau’s 50 percent), while Tibco does not feature on the list of established companies. As such, the acquisition of Jaspersoft will combine the strengths of both companies, giving them the possibility of competing against both start-ups like Platfora and SiSense, among others as well as bigger companies like Microsoft.

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SAN FRANCISCO – April 22, 2014 – Jaspersoft, the Intelligence Inside applications and business processes, today announced that it has been recognized by Info-Tech Research Group, a leading provider of IT research and advice, as a “Champion” and the “Value Award” winner in the Mid-Market Business Intelligence industry. The February 2014 report, “Vendor Landscape: Mid-Market BI,” highlights the major business intelligence (BI) vendors in the industry and how they are making their solutions more accessible through flexible deployment options and intuitive interfaces.

“The cloud has played an important role as a delivery medium for comprehensive small and mid-market solutions that seek to deliver rapid time-to-value without imposing heavy infrastructural demands,” said Info-Tech Research Group in their report. “Jaspersoft is the ideal platform for organizations new to BI, looking for a low cost solution with adequate functionality.”

In addition to being named the “Value Award” winner for low total cost of ownership (TCO), Jaspersoft was praised for its ad hoc reports and dashboards, which feature drag-and-drop designers to simplify interaction for non-technical users. The product was also lauded for its ease-of-use on mobile devices, HTML5 charting updates, and large community of open source developers, resulting in the company being given the “Champion” award.

“Despite BI solutions consistently listed as a top priority for CIOs, businesses have been hesitant to invest their IT budget into expensive and complicated software. However, our combination of a powerful BI platform offered in an affordable, subscription-based model has enabled IT leaders to save money without sacrificing functionality,” said Jim Bell, Chief Marketing Officer at Jaspersoft. “Being named the Value Award winner and a ‘Champion’ by Info-Tech Research Group validates the hard work that we’ve put into our product, business strategy, and functionality.”

Additional Resources:

• See Jaspersoft in action on Amazon EMR
• Learn more about Jaspersoft for AWS
• Learn more about Jaspersoft 5.5
• See why more than 130,000 organizations have chosen Jaspersoft
• Visit http://community.jaspersoft.com for more information about the Jaspersoft open source community
• Follow @Jaspersoft on Twitter to stay up-to-date on all of the company’s latest news and product information

About Jaspersoft
Jaspersoft empowers millions of people every day to make better decisions faster by bringing them timely, actionable data inside their apps and business processes. Its embeddable, cost-effective reporting and analytics platform allows anyone to quickly self-serve to get the answers they need, while scaling architecturally and economically to reach everyone. Thanks to a community that is hundreds-of-thousands strong, Jaspersoft’s commercial open source software has been downloaded millions of times and is used to create the Intelligence Inside hundreds of thousands of apps and business processes. Jaspersoft is a privately held company with offices around the world. For more information visit http://www.jaspersoft.com and http://community.jaspersoft.com.

About Info-Tech Research Group

With a paid membership of over 30,000 members worldwide, Info-Tech Research Group (www.infotech.com) is the global leader in providing tactical, practical Information Technology research and analysis. Info-Tech Research Group has a seventeen-year history of delivering quality research and is North America’s fastest growing full-service IT analyst firm.

San Francisco & London – April 8, 2014 – Jaspersoft, the Intelligence Inside applications and business processes, today announced the release of a Nucleus Research report validating how the utility-priced business analytics offered by Jaspersoft on Amazon Web Services (AWS) is disrupting the business analytics market.

According to the report – Amazon Web Services and Jaspersoft – A New Way of Looking at BI in the Cloud – companies moving from an on-premises SQL Server-based analytics environment could reduce ongoing software costs by 60 to 70 percent with the hourly utility-based pricing option ofJaspersoft through AWS Marketplace. In addition to reduced costs, the report found that early adopters of the Jaspersoft offering on AWS were able to accelerate time to value for pilot projects, proof of concepts and Enterprise production analytics operations.

“In analyzing the experiences of the Jaspersoft customers running on AWS and using Amazon Redshift, Nucleus found a number of key benefits including increased productivity, faster time to value, reduced risk, and lower cost,” said Nina Sandy, Principal Analyst for Nucleus Research. The report also found that customers of both Amazon Redshift and Jaspersoft saw more prevalent savings due to the pay-by-the-hour option. Jaspersoft offers its business intelligence server on AWS Marketplace starting at $0.48 per hour. Currently with 800 customers utilizing the offering in just nine months, the cloud-based offering also showed a shorter development time and lower cost of investment providing significantly reduced risk.

“We believe embedded intelligence represents the future of the BI market by bringing insight to users inside the applications where they spend their day,” said Karl Van den Bergh, Senior VP Customer Success & Product at Jaspersoft. “Thanks to the low cost and simplicity of the cloud, embedded analytics capabilities are available to a much broader population of developers.”

What customers said:

Reduced cost “Costs were definitely a concern for us. Amazon Redshift and Jaspersoft have saved us a significant amount of money versus other solutions. Pay as you go was the key value for us.”

Reduced risk “I can stop any time. I am not locked in. This is not a career risk because I can easily back out. There is no contract. Pay per hour – with no upfront costs, and the ability to turn it off when we decide to without any financial burden was a major factor in this decision.”

Accelerated time to value “We have a really small team. We don’t have to mess around with hardware, servers and software, but still get all the features and capabilities we need. We don’t need a huge team to maintain a large data environment.”

To learn more about Jaspersoft’s cloud analytics visit http://www.jaspersoft.com/cloud-analytics

We met up with Rudolf Bukmaier from Jaspersoft at CeBIT 2014 summit in Hannover. Rudolf Bukmaier is responsible for sales and business development at Jaspersoft in the Southern DACH region.

What is Jaspersoft?

Jaspersoft is an open source BI (Business Intelligence) provider.  Jaspersoft´s vision is to give every user in a company access to BI and thus access to information, to essentially provide answers which are data driven.  Our main focus is embedding BI, which means that Jaspersoft – in our vision – should be embedded in any application or every business, so it is not somewhere you go, but something you do.  There is no need to open new applications, it is already inside your application, as easy as clicking a new tab on a portal for you to run your dashboards and reports. As a software Jaspersoft is very easy to use and has a very nice user interface with all the functionalities that you need to answer your questions that you might have in terms of business.

As a company?

We started in 2006 in San Francisco, and now we have over 200 people worldwide with our headquarters in San Francisco, and regional offices in Dublin and Frankfurt, just to name a few.  As a company, Jaspersoft is the world’s most widely employed BI software. There are over 16 million downloads of our products so far, with 315,000 people in the open source community which helps us to stay innovative and give us feedback.

As a software?

Jaspersoft was developed with the intention of embedding since the beginning, so it is highly compatible and can embed in many different ways.  Of course, since we are an open source company, Jaspersoft has two different versions of software.  First the complete open source model which is without charge and second the commercial version which has plenty of features and comes along with support.

Who are your customers?

Our customers come mainly from the ISV sector. But basically we can work with any company that creates their own application – so a very wide range of organizations, even from the public sector.  Creating Dashboards and Reports is basically what customers do with our software, Those are static reports or interactive HTML5 charts. The reports and dashboards can be accessed from any mobile device, which provides a neat overview.  You also have the option to get a deep analytical view.

We are one of the few vendors that have a direct connection with Hadoop, which means you don’t have to go through an ETL and access the information directly.  We also have a cloud offering, and even an by-the-hour analytics, which has been very popular and successful.

What makes you different from your competitors?

There are lots of BI providers, but for us the two most important things are embedability and self-service.  BI should be embeddable into every application, and self-service to us means that even the lay-man can play around with the program and specify it to his needs.  It’s specifically not too technical or expensive.  The combination of these two aspects is what makes us most unique.  There are many BI tools that are self-service, but they are not embeddable.  Jaspersoft is cost-efective as there is no up-front licence fee, just a support and services fee. This is our main distinction.

What makes you unique?

One interesting thing about Jaspersoft is that we are modular, so depending on the features you want to have, you can start by just creating static reports, but on the next level, when you grow larger as a company, for example, you can decide you might need interactive reporting or to do some visualizations.  This is a common way Jaspersoft is doing business.  First, projects might be smaller, where only reporting is necessary with direct connection to a big data store, but then they grow with the business and need all the other functionalities, and we are very open and flexible in that term.

You can even use the free version, the fully open source version, and once you get familiar with the product, you can decide you want some of the other features and support, and upgrade.

We also have a per-server model, so we do not count users.  That means, if you scale up pretty high it’s still the same price.  We have a very attractive, flexible OEM model, because when you embed your software and resell it as a bundle package, this is necessary.

What is your business model?

Our customers usually buy suscriptions and pay a yearly fee that includes the commercial license and support, which we provide on different levels, as well as access to our systems. We have a support team and we are supported by partners in consulting and project implementation areas.  Of course we could do that ourselves, but as this is not our main focus, we benefit from a very lively partnership program

Is Berlin an interesting market for you?

Of course.  It is a very interesting market because we realize that lots of companies from tech and software industries and start-ups are moving to Berlin.  I would even call Berlin the small German Silicon Valley at this point.  We notice a lot of interest from that area at the moment.

Where do you see Jaspersoft in one year?

Our goal is to become the de-facto standard BI tool when it comes to the embedded BI market.  We have competitors, but I think we are ahead of them, in terms of embedding.  We want to grow the market share in that region.  We want to gain more customers, we want to be a totally customer focused company, which we are, but there is still room for improvement of course.  So all in all, we plan to get bigger and better in what we are doing.

For more info on Jaspersoft, please visit : http://www.jaspersoft.com/

We met up with Rudolf Bukmaier from Jaspersoft at CeBIT 2014 summit in Hannover. Rudolf Bukmaier is responsible for sales and business development at Jaspersoft in the Southern DACH region.