News

Jaspersoft's Java Reporting Engine Integrated with Cloud Foundry, Red Hat Virt

• By John K. Waters
• January 23, 2012

Open-source business intelligence (BI) vendor Jaspersoft recently made its popular Java reporting engine, JasperReports Server, available in the products of two fierce cloud competitors: VMware's relatively young Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, and the latest version of Red Hat's Enterprise Virtualization.

The San Francisco-based Jaspersoft makes one of the most widely used set of open source BI tools. The company claims nearly 11 million downloads worldwide of its Java-based software, and 13,000 commercial customers in 100 countries.

The Red Hat integration was announced this week (Jan 18), along with the much anticipated general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 (RHEV3). Red Hat has made the JasperReports Server a core component of the new version of its virtualization platform. The embedded BI adds the ability to produce interactive reports, dashboards, and ad hoc reporting and analysis to the platform's kernel-based hypervisor and related server and desktop virtualization management capabilities.

RHEV is billed by the company as an open-source, enterprise-ready, and complete virtualization management solution. Version 3.0 updates the KVM hypervisor at the core of the Red Hat offering, from version 5.7 to version 6.2. And it now runs on Linux as well as Windows. It also adds a new self-service portal for provisioning VMs, access via a RESTful API, the ability to store data locally on client machines and, via integration with the company's private cloud management product CloudForms, a limited ability to manage hypervisors from other vendors.

VMware announced the availability of JasperReports Server in its Cloud Foundry package last week. The open source Java reporting tool is accessed via the Cloud Foundry command line tool, and allows users of the PaaS to build reports querying the Cloud Foundry data services. Writing on the Cloud Foundry blog, Jaspersoft's Matthew Dahlman described the integration as "a logical extension for the most widely used Business Intelligence solution to move into the PaaS world" via Cloud Foundry.

"Cloud Foundry is a strategic platform for many users," Dahlman wrote. "As more applications get deployed to Cloud Foundry open PaaS, more developers will find the need to perform reporting and analysis (Business Intelligence) on the data that they are gathering. You could write your own reporting features...but that's a lot of work, and it's generally not your core strength. It makes sense to focus on improving your own application, and then embed analysis and reporting features."

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware announced the initial Cloud Foundry release last April, billing it as the industry's first open PaaS offering and a "new generation of application platform, architected specifically for cloud computing environments." IDC analyst Al Hilwa saw the Cloud Foundry release as an important strategic move that positioned VMware as "another emerging pole for Java developers."