Like a courting couple that aren’t quite ready to tie the knot, BI firm Jaspersoft announced a new integration with Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS (platform as a service).
Having made an investment in Jaspersoft a while back, it’s not clear why Red Hat doesn’t just buy the open source BI firm lock, stock and open source barrel.
In a recent interview, Red Hat’s CEO Jim Whitehurst told CBR, "I think BI is a logical extension from a middleware portfolio. We made an investment in Jaspersoft so we’re good partners with those people. So at some point in the future having a BI offering could be a nice way to augment what we have. Certainly it’s something that I think our core customer uses and likes and is interested in, so I think that’s an opportunity for us in the future."
And at a recent Red Hat JBoss event, when CBR asked of an infographic about the firm’s portfolio, "Where is BI in this picture?", a JBoss spokesperson tellingly replied, "It isn’t, yet."
For the time being though Jaspersoft and Red Hat are purporting to remain just good friends. In a joint webinar with Red Hat today, Jaspersoft showcased the planned integration of Jaspersoft BI with Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS. Working with Red Hat to leverage its cloud application lifecycle management tools, Jaspersoft claimed it delivers powerful reporting capabilities for better decision making through a choice of deployments including on-premises, as well as public, private, or hybrid clouds.
"With the high volume of data businesses are generating, the combination of Jaspersoft BI with Red Hat OpenShift provides a fast and efficient way to not only develop and deploy data-driven applications, but also harness them to derive meaningful insights from a variety of data sources," the press release says.
"Jaspersoft is excited to team with Red Hat to build the industry’s first BI for PaaS," said Karl Van den Bergh, Jaspersoft’s VP of product and alliances. "We are uniquely positioned to capitalise on the shift of application development to the cloud with our modern architecture, the world’s largest BI community building data-driven applications, and our open source model. Today’s announcement about the planned integration of Jaspersoft with Red Hat OpenShift is the first of several that demonstrates our leadership in BI for PaaS."
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"Red Hat is helping organisations to develop private, public and hybrid clouds with solutions like our CloudForms Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering that is currently in beta, while at the same time making it easy for developers to leverage clouds with our OpenShift PaaS," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president, cloud business unit at Red Hat. "With Jaspersoft’s suite of reporting and analysis capabilities now available on OpenShift, organisations can quickly realise the benefits of the cloud while gaining deep insights from the data that powers these applications."
I reckon Red Hat will buy Jaspersoft before the year is out, most likely in the first half. The valuation will have a knock-on effect on rival open source BI firms including Pentaho, Actuate and Talend. Watch this space.
What do you think — will Red Hat buy Jaspersoft? Is open source BI a flash in the pan, as suggested by SAS CEO Jim Goodnight? Comment below or tweet me. Thanks.
