I spent all of last week traveling through Europe – meeting with open source partners and speaking with analysts and press about all-things business intelligence and open source. It was truly “trains, planes, and automobiles”, with a few city buses tossed in for complexity. In total, a very valuable trip, though. As example, I met with John Powell, CEO of Alfresco (www.alfresco.com). We swapped successes and concerns and I was thrilled to learn that, like Jaspersoft, this open source content management leader is doing very well, despite the vex-some global economy (or perhaps because of the vex-some global economy?). 

My primary task in travel, though, was to amplify the important announcements that have occurred for Jaspersoft and the world of open source business intelligence . . . no doubt you’ve already stitched together the theme. Just in case, I’ll spell it all out for you here briefly.

First, in mid-August, we debuted a remarkable demonstration of our technology integrated with Infobright’s Brighthouse product - which runs atop MySQL – and provides an optimized, columnar-oriented data warehouse engine. Key to this demonstration is the expertise at OpenBI, one of our most highly-skilled open source BI consulting partners (www.openbi.com).   For unmatched scalability and value, this combination of products is truly second-to-none.   Check this out at the on-demand webinar section of our web site (http://www.jaspersoft.com/nw_events1.html). 

Second, earlier this month, Jaspersoft and Infobright (www.infobright.com) announced a bundle of open source (Community Edition) software to dramatically alter the value delivered in this arena. Specifically, the two companies “today announced plans to deliver a joint end-to-end open source BI and data warehouse solution, available as a JasperForge project.  JasperForge.org is the largest open source community portal with hundreds of projects for the Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite. The new joint project bundle will be based on Jaspersoft and several Sun open source products, as well as the new open source data warehouse software, Infobright Community Edition (ICE). This enterprise-class, self-managing solution is a proven alternative to today’s high-cost, high-maintenance data warehouse products.”

So, at this point, the stage seems set . . . and our focus on delivering valuable, scalable open source BI for even sophisticated data warehouse-based projects is obvious. But then, this week, we added even more mettle to this equation by extending our partnership with Talend, the leading commercial open source data integration company. 

For nearly two years, Talend (www.talend.com) has been behind our JasperETL product, which enables the simple and quick construction of data warehouses and data marts so that data can be fully utilized by JasperServer and JasperAnalysis.In summary, we announced that we have extended our partnership agreement by developing an entirely new version of the JasperETL solution, designed specifically to include the features most used by Jaspersoft’s BI customers.  Powered by Talend, this JasperETL package will combine the elements of Talend Integration Suite that are the most relevant for BI users, and will meet Jaspersoft customers’ requests for an ETL capability that delivers more power and flexibility in their BI deployments. The new version of JasperETL will be offered exclusively from Jaspersoft and will be included in every paid subscription of the Jaspersoft BI suite. 

Renewing and extending our agreement with Talend seemed perfectly appropriate under the backdrop of the Paris Capitale du Libre event, which was held this week in Paris. My last post cited the fantastic progress and momentum that open source (and Jaspersoft) is seeing in Europe. So lastly, I’ll simply encourage you to read our press release (dated September 24) to learn more about our customer and community traction in the Euro Zone: http://www.jaspersoft.c om/nw_press_jaspersoft_translates_european_roots.html