News

Java Reporting Engine Brings Utility Pricing to the Analytics Layer

• By John K. Waters
• November 5, 2013

Open-source business intelligence (BI) vendor Jaspersoft has extended the integration of its reporting and analytics server with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to include Amazon's Elastic MapReduce service (EMR). The company was already supporting Amazon's cloud-based Relational Database Service (RDS) and its petabyte-scale data-warehouse-in-the-cloud known as Redshift. The new support makes the company's BI tools available for users of the Hadoop-based EMR on an hourly basis.

This type of utility pricing has been growing in popularity at the infrastructure layer for some time, but it's a new phenomenon in the analytics layer, explained Karl Van den Bergh, vice president of product and alliances at Jaspersoft. In fact, Jaspersoft claims to be the first.

"That low-cost, no-commitment-up-front model -- at most, you're signing up for an hour -- is an inviting way to get started with reporting and analytics," Van den Bergh told ADTmag, "particularly when you have the ability to turn it on and off when you're in dev, test, prototyping, or POC mode."

Jaspersoft introduced this pricing model in February, and six months later celebrated its 500th customer, declaring that utility pricing had "disrupted the BI landscape."

San Francisco-based company, which makes one of the most popular Java-based reporting engines, the open-source JasperReports, has been something of a poster child for the AWS Marketplace, Amazon's iTunes for software running in its cloud. Vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, and SAP provide tools built for the AWS platform and provided on a pay-by-the-hour basis through the marketplace. Amazon lists Jaspersoft's BI Professional for AWS offering among its top selling business tools.

Jaspersoft just released the latest version of its flagship BI platform, Jaspersoft 5.5. The latest release adds new data visualization capabilities, pre-built report templates, and enhanced cluster-aware caching for high availability. Version 5.5 also comes with the GA release of Jaspersoft Studio, an Eclipse-based, "full re-write" of the company's signature reporting tool, iReport Designer.

Amazon's EMR utilizes the Hadoop open-source framework, which comprises Google's MapReduce programming model for processing large data sets and the HDFS distributed file system. More than 500 Jaspersoft customers are currently using AWS, Van den Bergh said, 

"This stack allows people to experiment without necessarily knowing exactly what they're going to do with it," Van den Bergh said. "They can try out these tools and this capability with really no commitment. It's going to interesting."