Jaspersoft Releases Business Intelligence Suite 4.5 - Analytics Offering for Any Flavor of (Big) Data

December 12, 2011

Designed with the non-technical user in mind, Jaspersoft 4.5 is the industry’s only solution that delivers drag-and-drop analytics and reporting on any flavor of Big Data including Apache Hadoop, NoSQL and analytic databases. Key new Big Data features include an enhanced analysis user interface, an improved in-memory engine with intelligent query push-down for greater performance, and native, low-latency access to non-relational data like Hadoop HBase and MongoDB. Enhanced Excel output and extended REST APIs round out the significant feature set in this milestone release for the company.

The growth in data volume, variety and velocity has led to an explosion in new data stores to capture and process that data. However, the opportunity for new insight from this data is hampered by today’s BI solutions that require an SQL interface. An SQL interface such as Hadoop Hive is often not suitable for real-time data exploration because of its high latency. For non-SQL interfaces like MongoDB or Cassandra, other BI tools have to extract and load the data into a relational database for analysis. These challenges result in greater cost, complexity and delays, making it harder for analysts to derive insight quickly from these data sources. Jaspersoft 4.5 enables analysts to connect natively to Big Data stores, including those that do not have an SQL interface, performing ad hoc analysis and data exploration, without introducing latency.

“Every business has different requirements and challenges for analyzing and presenting data, especially as the size of datasets becomes bigger and more varied. Jaspersoft’s latest release is unique in accessing different types of data with more sophistication than other BI platforms in the market. Jaspersoft’s connectivity architecture and improved UI validate our research, which shows that Big Data use is growing and that analysis tools continue to make their offering to businesses more valuable,” states David Menninger, VP and Research Director at Ventana Research.

“Our customers demand rapid access to large volumes of complex data,” said Jeff Wilkens, Chairman of Entiera, a leading marketing applications provider. “With the new analytic performance capabilities in Jaspersoft 4.5, we're able to drive analysis across millions of records in Vertica, providing our customers with the insight required to make actionable marketing decisions in a matter of seconds.”

Key features of Jaspersoft 4.5 include:

Enhanced web-based drag-and-drop designer delivering simplicity for non-technical users who want to build their own reports and analyze data from relational, OLAP, and Big Data sources
In-memory engine with intelligent query push-down reducing response time to aggregation and summary queries and delivering faster results to analytic questions
Broad and deep Big Data connectivity for Hadoop, MongoDB, Cassandra, and more, providing direct, native access for fast data exploration or batch-oriented reports
Expanded REST-based web services architecture supporting superior performance and usability for integration with web and native mobile applications
Improved Excel exporter which passes smarter default values and leverages native Excel features like Grouping and AutoFilter to improve the usability of exported reports and OLAP views

“Jaspersoft 4.5 is a critical milestone for our customers. We now proudly deliver a complete reporting and analysis solution for all types of data,” said Karl Van den Bergh, Vice President, Product & Alliances, Jaspersoft Corporation. “The solution provides significant performance improvements and even more flexibility in reporting capabilities. It also supports our vision to make BI more pervasive, bringing better decision-making capability to users across the organization.”

Bruce Weed, Program Director, Big Data Business Development at IBM said, “Jaspersoft continues to enhance its capabilities around Big Data. With its flexible and powerful technology and its large developer community, Jaspersoft is an important partner in our Big Data ecosystem.”