Jaspersoft Targets Platform as a Service Market For Business Intelligence Analytics

In an effort to gain market share in the Platform as a Service cloud computing space, Jaspersoft announced it had reached an agreement with Red Hat to bundle its community edition for free with Red Hat’s PaaS OpenShift. Jaspersoft’s availability within the OpenShift platform is intended to entice developers and administrators to embed Jaspersoft business intelligence analytics into their applications. Developers who progress from the free, community Jaspersoft edition to a subscription version will be able to migrate all of the code used in the community version. Karl Van den Bergh, Jaspersoft’s Vice President of Product and Alliances, noted that Jaspersoft’s integration with Red Hat constitutes the “first of several [partnerships] that demonstrates our leadership in BI for PaaS.” Jaspersoft’s strategic alliance with Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS platform illustrates an emerging sub-market within the cloud computing space separate from cloud security, namely, business intelligence applications integrated with PaaS or IaaS cloud offerings. Gooddata, for example, offers BI development capabilities within the Amazon Web Services environment. Unconfirmed reports indicate that Jaspersoft is additionally targeting VMware’s Cloud Foundry as a possible seeding ground for its BI software as well as Salesforce.com’s Heroku.

The PaaS market currently features products such as OpenShift (Red Hat), Cloud Foundry (VMware), CloudSwing (OpenLogic), Engine Yard Cloud (Engine Yard), Heroku (Salesforce), Azure (Microsoft), Google App Engine (Google), Cumulogic PaaS (CumuLogic), dotCloud, and Appfog. Although PaaS revenues are currently miniscule in comparison to IaaS, the market is expected to grow rapidly in the next five to ten years from Gartner’s projection of $707.4 million in 2011 PaaS revenues.