Cloud cracks century for open source BI

Beverley Head
Tuesday, 09 November 2010 15:54

Business intelligence is one of the more recent arrivals on the cloud scene - but open source BI provider Jaspersoft has announced that it has cracked its first century of BI cloud based customers with demand almost tripling during the year.

According to Karl Van den Bergh, vice president of product strategy, besides the 100 cloud based users of the product, the company boasts 12 million downloads of its free software, along with 13,000 commercial customers. It also claims an open source community of 175,000 registered members.

In Australia the company has named just one local user of its cloud based system - SaaS vendor Yarris. According to Yarris CEO Michael Fieldhouse, Jaspersoft underpins the reporting module that it offers to customers from its own Australian based data centre.

Jaspersoft's model for cloud delivery has been to have it supplied as part of a PaaS and SaaS cloud. Mr Van den Bergh explained that unlike, say CRM applications, which could be sold as a straightforward SaaS because they had a constrained data model, BI applications needed to be able to access all an organisation's data and hence needed a combination of SaaS and PaaS.

'We are agnostic to the actual cloud,' said Mr Van den Bergh. However he acknowledged that for BI applications, 'You wouldn't want to connect to a cloud in the US from Australia.'

Although organisations might not have to upload a full copy of their data-warehouse to the BI cloud each day to perform data analysis, they would have to upload a delta of the data, which could make use of an overseas based cloud platform prohibitive in terms of latency.

Prospective users needed instead to find a local PaaS vendor to host the BI tools in the cloud.