Open Source Business Intelligence Suite by Jaspersoft is one of the most common BI platforms, used across organizations of all types and sizes. It joints the advantages of dashboards, analysis, reporting, and data integration tools within one self-sufficient suite.

Business Intelligence solution vendors focus on automating the work of their platforms. They attach weight to the relations between the tools within the platform and try to make their cooperation as natural as possible. Thereupon, the whole suites are considered valuable more than separate tools for each of BI tasks. Jaspersoft Open Source Business Intelligence Suite proves that it's not a wrong point of view.

The main goal which the Jaspersoft suite creators were aspiring to was making the solution truly universal and easy to implement and deploy in even the most differentiated organizations. Thereupon, a much attention was paid to the suite's flexibility and emphasis to deliver timely and accurate data. The BI Platform coordinates the process of data store, flow, and spread, ensuring it always is accessible when it's needed. It stores and - simultaneously - secures and distributes the result of other suite's components' work: dashboards, reports, and analysis.

Jaspersoft Reporting Software

Organizations have different reporting needs. Thereupon, reporting solutions have to be prepared for providing static and dynamic reports equally well. Reporting Software by Jaspersoft meets different standards in report creating. People who are interested in clean facts solely can choose static and structured types of reports to ensure that nothing else than needed is going to distract them. On the other end of a scale, people who consider different point of view equally worth investigating may choose from many types of dynamic reports which can be further edited with one mouse click. Easy and intuitive.

Jaspersoft Dashboards

More and more often particular reports are considered not deep enough. Significantly restricted number of different points of view makes them not efficient enough in case of deep and multidimensional analysis. Thereupon, more and more organizations decide to turn to dashboards being from some point of view a one step forward into reporting complexity. Jaspersoft BI Suite provides a self-sufficient environment for dashboards creating. As a result, business dashboard creators don't require any IT involvement nor support to prepare their own dashboards (and mashboards which are thought to be something between a regular dashboard and a mash-up) and share them with other employees across the organization. What's important, dashboards are based on real-time information which originates from different data sources (public and private ones at the same time).

Jaspersoft Analysis

Even the largest volumes of data couldn't play their role efficiently if they're not followed with proper analysis. The same as in case of reporting requirements, analytic needs also are differentiated and depend on users' needs and skills. Some of them prefer the fundamental capabilities and the simplest options while others need powerful analytical environment with plenty of different options and capabilities. With Jaspersoft Analysis both groups would be satisfied. It provides quick end expense-free in-memory analysis with most of popular options (slicing, dicing, filtering, etc.). At the same time, it's possible to perform complex online analytical processing (referred to as OLAP) to use with data marts and data warehouses.

Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite products

Jaspersoft Open Source Business Intelligence Suite consists of plenty of different useful tools, nonetheless the most meaningful products are five:

• JasperReports Library
• Jaspersoft iReport Designer
• JasperReports Server
• Jaspersoft OLAP
• Jaspersoft ETL

JasperReports Library is "nothing more" than just a powerful reporting tool. Simultaneously, it's probably the most common Java reporting engine which allows to turn data from different data sources into easily understandable and coherent documents which - then - may be printed or, for instance, saved in different formats to let as many people benefit from it as possible. Simultaneously, Jaspersoft iReport Designer is used for slightly similar purposes which are creating and editing reports in multiple formats. What keeps it all together is JasperReports Server - a product responsible for report organization. It helps with delivering reports and dashboards and simultaneously organizes them and secures. What's important is the fact that no special knowledge nor skills are needed to use JasperReports Server - it's intuitive enough to let even the very beginners work with it properly.

Speaking about ease of usage, Jaspersoft OLAP - another member of Jaspersoft Open Source Business Intelligence products family - can be used through well known Excel interface or web-based interface as well. What's this tool for is supporting powerful data analysis (within extremely large data sets driven with complex queries). Finally, Jaspersoft ETL is responsible for all ETL (extract, transform, and load) processes. It's needed to turn data into information understandable to the system.

Jaspersoft Open Source Business Intelligence Suite is one of these product families which - even though consist of many separated components - is absolutely coherent. What it results in is ease of usage - there is only a few things which business users without any IT skills nor experience could have difficulties with and demand special department's support. As a consequence, grows the efficiency with simultaneous lowering of maintenance costs.

Jaspersoft Open Source Business Intelligence Suite resources:

http://www.jaspersoft.com/products - the vendor provides all the fundamental information about the Business Intelligence suite. There is an overview (which, in point of fact, couldn't be shorter) and a lot more about the capabilities and each product which the suite consists of. Additionally, there's a comparison of different Jaspersoft Open Source Business Intelligence Suite's editions and some additional information (about system requirements, for instance).

http://www.jaspersoft.com/resources/whitepapers - official website by Jaspersoft contains quite an interesting set of different white papers applying to diverse aspects of Business Intelligence. In most of cases they are written according to potential use of Jaspersoft software, however a lot of information may be considered interesting by the users of other vendors' solutions as well.

http://www.information-management.com/news/business_intelligence_open_source_data_integration_SaaS-10019486-1.html - the article behind the link dates back on January 11, 2011 and announces the newest release of Jaspersoft Business Intelligence solution. The attention here is paid to novelties, especially enhanced integration capabilities and a brand-new interface which has a lot in common with widely known Web applications so that could be better understood by less advanced users.