San Francisco-based JasperSoft announced it is including a special hosted version of its open source BI software, called Jasper4Salesforce.com, as part of Salesforce.com Inc’s AppExchange online marketplace. Salesforce.com announced AppExchange last year as part of strategy designed to forge deeper integration with third-party enterprise applications and infrastructure.
Salesforce.com has recently hinted strongly at improving BI and analytics for its CRM customers as part of its recently announced Winter 07 CRM platform release.
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said at London preview event earlier this month that Winter 07, which is due to be released in the fourth quarter, will offer analytic mashboard capabilities.
Benioff said that the inclusion of componentized functionality like BI and analytics marks the start of a new phase of development for the Salesforce.com SaaS platform, specifically to help it transition from an on demand application provider to on demand platform provider.
The move is part of a concentrated strategy by Salesforce.com to provide deeper customization options for its CRM customers. By that the company means providing new functionality in Winter 07 to enable componentization of analytics dashboards using the notion of applications integrated as mashups.
Recent developments in the underlying Salesforce.com platform allow for any engine, such as the analytics engine, to run on top of the [Salesforce.com] platform, explained Salesforce.com COO Phill Robinson.
For example, instead of taking full analytic applications or pre-configured dashboards, Salesforce.com users will be able to add analytic dashboards into their hosted CRM initiatives by integrating their own custom built components or technologies or those provided by AppExchange partners that are geared around their own specific key performance indicators.
Robinson said that Salesforce.com users would be able to select analytical components from a range of providers and combine them into a single view or dashboard hosted as part of the Salesforce.com platform.
It’s SOA on demand. You don’t have to install any software, it is modular and componentized, and you can pick and mix,
Salesforce.com is expected to provide more details of Winter 07’s new componentized architecture at its Dreamforce user conference next month.
JasperSoft is not the first BI and analytic mashup to be included in AppExchange. In April this year Business Objects SA also announced it is integrating its Crystal and Xcelsius reporting and dashboarding software with Salesforce.com’s new dashboard framework for enhanced reporting and visualization of customer-related data.
JasperSoft officials however dismissed Business Objects’ current AppExchange offering as providing simplistic reporting, saying it had numerous limitations and required customers to first buy a Crystal license and install a full-client report design tool; Business Objects’ hosted offering is only to distribute and share reports across the enterprise.
Rather than requiring to have a separate application hosted on either on a client or a server, JasperSoft officials pointed out that Jasper4Salesforce is web-based reporting and uses drag and drop ‘create report’ button directly inside of native salesforce.com applications.
JasperSoft claims its open source BI software has been downloaded over 1.5 times has garnered 15,000 deployments to date. The company said the modular nature of its BI software makes it easy to integrate reporting, analysis and dashboard capabilities into the Salesforce.com CRM suite.
The JasperSoft mashup will also provide Salesforce.com customers with staple reporting capabilities against combinations of standard and custom data objects and includes ad hoc query wizards and automated report scheduling and distribution.
JasperSoft’s mashup is in line with Salesforce.com’s strategy to broaden the functionality of its SaaS CRM platform to compete more strongly against enterprise software vendors like Oracle Corp and SAP AG. But unlike these vendors, Salesforce.com said it is not trying to build all the functionality in-house
We prefer to provide the infrastructure and the AppExchange-based development and deployment platform so third parties can concentrate on functional developments in CRM and increasingly non-CRM areas, Robinson said.
Robinson also added that BI and analytics is just the first step towards broader componentization, and that Salesforce.com will expand this capability into other functional areas in the future.
The dashboard is illustrative of the way our platform has developed, he said.
Even though Salesforce.com has not pre-announced further component application areas, it is likely to reveal plans for additional engines at Dreamforce next month.
As with existing complementary Salesforce.com applications, JasperSoft’s BI components will be delivered alongside the 300-plus applications also offered on AppExchange.
