Red Hat, Jaspersoft Bring Business Intelligence To Cloud Platforms

Jaspersoft teamed up with Red Hat to offer a Platform-as-a-Service system with built-in business intelligence capabilities.

The move will make it easier for developers to build cloud-based BI and analytical applications, said Karl Van den Bergh, vice president of product and alliances at BI software developer Jaspersoft. BI capabilities "will become a key component of any application that's built in the cloud because of the data-driven nature of applications today," he said.

Jaspersoft has integrated its BI software with Red Hat OpenShift, the company's open-source Platform-as-a-Service system. Developers use OpenShift to develop cloud applications using Java, Ruby, Perl, PHP or Python development tools.

The Jaspersoft-Red Hat OpenShift integration also will make it easier for applications to access a variety of data sources, Van den Bergh said. In December Jaspersoft released a connector to the MongoDB "noSQL" database, for example, and links to the MySQL and PostgreSQL databases are available as well.

The Platform-as-a-Service market is expected to reach $12 billion by 2020, according to Forrester Research.

The Platform-as-a-Service and BI development system targets ISVs building Software-as-a-Service applications, corporate developers assembling applications for private clouds, and service providers that need to develop custom cloud applications for customers, Van den Bergh said.

Jaspersoft is in talks with other Platform-as-a-Service vendors about forging similar alliances, according to Van den Bergh, but he declined to say more.

Jaspersoft for Red Hat OpenShift is available as a free download from Jaspersoft. A commercial version is slated to be released in the future.