Last year, when AWS announced its Data Warehousing service, RedShift, there was much interest from the punditry as to what it meant for the existing companies offering similar services built on top of AWS infrastructure. One of those vendors, Jaspersoft, reached out to me recently with a couple of announcements, one of which was that it has acquired over 500 customers directly from the AWS marketplace – that’s kind of interesting given the obvious tension between Jaspersoft and Redshift, so I wanted to dive into it a bit further.

Jaspersoft has been available on the marketplace for six months and offers customers the full BI suite of reporting, dashboards, visualizations and data exploration on a utility-based pricing model starting at 40 cents an hour. They’ve also interestingly begun adding an annual subscription, possibly as a reaction to larger customers who tend to prefer the stability and certainty that annual billing models bring.

It’s a pretty impressive showing given the competitive tensions – it has to be noted that RedShift and Jaspersoft aren’t completely competitive, as I mentioned when Redshift launched:

…of course there are differences between Redshift and other analysis/warehouse tools – Redshift itself works with existing analytics products from the likes of Jaspersoft and Cognos – but that’s a shaky piece of ground to try and build a defensible product play from

I asked Jaspersoft about these competitive tensions and their response was very much “on message”:

We are finding quite a few who are using Jaspersoft for AWS with Amazon Redshift. Customers love the fact that the pricing models align perfectly (both are by the hour with no user restrictions and no additional fees) and both appear as line items on their AWS bill. We have received a lot of support from the AWS team. We are working with them closely on a number of programs including a 12-city tour in Asia and will be sponsoring their annual user conference in Vegas in November, re:Invent.

Anyway – Jaspersoft is seeing a wide range of customer types – high-tech, media, retail and healthcare alongside a spread of customers from startups to enterprise. They’ve also branched out and are offering the suite on Windows Azure – possibly a smart way to reduce the competitive pressure of relying on the platform of a sometimes competitor for customer acquisition. Jaspersoft is the first open source BI offering to be introduced to Azure.

Fundamentally cloud BI is a really valuable development – it brings a service formerly only available to the largest of enterprises down to small organizations – it also means that analysis of data sets that previously couldn’t get over the cost/benefit bar can now happen – driving benefits and increasing opportunities for organizations.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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  • SQIAR (http://www.sqiar.com) is a leading global consultancy which provides innovative business intelligence services to small and medium size (SMEs) businesses. Our agile approach provides organizations with breakthrough insights and powerful data visualizations to rapidly analyse multiple aspects of their business in perspectives that matter most.

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