We met up with Rudolf Bukmaier from Jaspersoft at CeBIT 2014 summit in Hannover. Rudolf Bukmaier is responsible for sales and business development at Jaspersoft in the Southern DACH region.
What is Jaspersoft?
Jaspersoft is an open source BI (Business Intelligence) provider. Jaspersoft´s vision is to give every user in a company access to BI and thus access to information, to essentially provide answers which are data driven.  Our main focus is embedding BI, which means that Jaspersoft – in our vision – should be embedded in any application or every business, so it is not somewhere you go, but something you do. There is no need to open new applications, it is already inside your application, as easy as clicking a new tab on a portal for you to run your dashboards and reports. As a software Jaspersoft is very easy to use and has a very nice user interface with all the functionalities that you need to answer your questions that you might have in terms of business.
As a company?
We started in 2006 in San Francisco, and now we have over 200 people worldwide with our headquarters in San Francisco, and regional offices in Dublin and Frankfurt, just to name a few. As a company, Jaspersoft is the world’s most widely employed BI software. There are over 16 million downloads of our products so far, with 315,000 people in the open source community which helps us to stay innovative and give us feedback.
As a software?
Jaspersoft was developed with the intention of embedding since the beginning, so it is highly compatible and can embed in many different ways. Of course, since we are an open source company, Jaspersoft has two different versions of software. First the complete open source model which is without charge and second the commercial version which has plenty of features and comes along with support.
Who are your customers?
Our customers come mainly from the ISV sector. But basically we can work with any company that creates their own application – so a very wide range of organizations, even from the public sector. Creating Dashboards and Reports is basically what customers do with our software, Those are static reports or interactive HTML5 charts. The reports and dashboards can be accessed from any mobile device, which provides a neat overview. You also have the option to get a deep analytical view.
We are one of the few vendors that have a direct connection with Hadoop, which means you don’t have to go through an ETL and access the information directly. We also have a cloud offering, and even an by-the-hour analytics, which has been very popular and successful.
What makes you different from your competitors?
There are lots of BI providers, but for us the two most important things are embedability and self-service. BI should be embeddable into every application, and self-service to us means that even the lay-man can play around with the program and specify it to his needs. It’s specifically not too technical or expensive. The combination of these two aspects is what makes us most unique. There are many BI tools that are self-service, but they are not embeddable. Jaspersoft is cost-efective as there is no up-front licence fee, just a support and services fee. This is our main distinction.
What makes you unique?
One interesting thing about Jaspersoft is that we are modular, so depending on the features you want to have, you can start by just creating static reports, but on the next level, when you grow larger as a company, for example, you can decide you might need interactive reporting or to do some visualizations. This is a common way Jaspersoft is doing business. First, projects might be smaller, where only reporting is necessary with direct connection to a big data store, but then they grow with the business and need all the other functionalities, and we are very open and flexible in that term.
You can even use the free version, the fully open source version, and once you get familiar with the product, you can decide you want some of the other features and support, and upgrade.
We also have a per-server model, so we do not count users. That means, if you scale up pretty high it’s still the same price. We have a very attractive, flexible OEM model, because when you embed your software and resell it as a bundle package, this is necessary.
What is your business model?
Our customers usually buy suscriptions and pay a yearly fee that includes the commercial license and support, which we provide on different levels, as well as access to our systems. We have a support team and we are supported by partners in consulting and project implementation areas. Of course we could do that ourselves, but as this is not our main focus, we benefit from a very lively partnership program
Is Berlin an interesting market for you?
Of course. It is a very interesting market because we realize that lots of companies from tech and software industries and start-ups are moving to Berlin. I would even call Berlin the small German Silicon Valley at this point. We notice a lot of interest from that area at the moment.
Where do you see Jaspersoft in one year?
Our goal is to become the de-facto standard BI tool when it comes to the embedded BI market. We have competitors, but I think we are ahead of them, in terms of embedding. We want to grow the market share in that region. We want to gain more customers, we want to be a totally customer focused company, which we are, but there is still room for improvement of course. So all in all, we plan to get bigger and better in what we are doing.
For more info on Jaspersoft, please visit :Â http://www.jaspersoft.com/
We met up with Rudolf Bukmaier from Jaspersoft at CeBIT 2014 summit in Hannover. Rudolf Bukmaier is responsible for sales and business development at Jaspersoft in the Southern DACH region.
