Jaspersoft 5, the first major overhaul of the vendor’s flagship release in nearly two years, focuses on visualizations based in HTML5 and connected to an expanded columnar in-memory engine. Power users can take on data explorations via a new visualizations engine that includes reporting customization to the levels of formatting and cross-tab sorting. The latest generation of the platform includes built-in virtualization for metadata searches and analysis, and an in-memory database that can pull in a host of sources to terabyte-sized scale.
In a statement on the latest generation of the release, Jaspersoft CEO Brian Gentile highlighted the delivery of architecture inside a Web browser using HTML5 as an edge over competitors in the visualization space.
Cindi Howson, founder of the industry assessment firm BI Scorecard, says she’s “impressed” by the exploration capabilities in the Jaspersoft update, which bring along potential for new visualizations as well as a simplified interface for both OLAP and relational data.
“There has been a lot of excitement in the industry about self-service BI as it relates to visual data discovery and ,in that excitement, interactive reporting can be an overlooked but critical form of self-service BI. It is the type of self-service that a wider range of report consumers need and Jaspersoft gets some of the highest marks for interactive reporting of any of the vendors we cover,” says Howson.
Other features, new or enhanced, in the latest edition include PHP access to REST APIs and OLAP analysis that includes support for Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services.
Justin Kern is senior editor at Information Management and can be reached at justin.kern@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @IMJustinKern.
