The investment was led by Partech International, one of the original VC firms that funded Business Objects SA, the French-US business intelligence software giant.
JasperSoft’s chief executive, Paul Doscher, was the former Americas general manager for Business Objects. Other investors in the latest round of funding include Doll Capital and Morgenthaler.
In total JasperSoft has raised $23.3m of funding to date; earlier rounds were closed in February 2001 and April 2003.
Officials at San Francisco-based JapserSoft say the money will be directed at developing its open source (JasperReports) and commercial (JasperDecsions) reporting products. Part of the money will be set aside to provide customers with a simpler migration path between the two products.
JasperReports is an open source reporting tool that had languished as a sleepy open source project until the company snapped up its trademark and copyrights last year. JasperSoft claims over 22,000 downloads of the code per month, and estimates it has been deployed at over 10,000 companies worldwide.
Jasper Decisions is a commercial, server-based product that JasperSoft developed under the name Panscopic over the past four years. The product is best described as a proprietary report-aggregation portal that allows companies to embed advanced reporting capabilities into business applications. JasperDecisions is priced at $10,000 per CPU.
The company aims to use JasperReports and JasperDecisions as a one-two punch offering; the idea being that open source customers will purchase the server and then extend the front-end reporting capabilities for more users as required.
Doscher said JasperSoft is building a wrapper around JasperReports to make its report templates look like another component managed in the JasperDecisions server. Users will be able to access these reports directly from the portal.
Its no coincidence that the lion’s share of VC funding in BI is being directed to open source vendors. JasperSoft joins a growing band of BI vendors like Greenplum Inc and Pentaho Corp that share similar open source ideals and have also attracted VC funding.
But even though BI is a mature market open source reporting and data warehousing products still have a long way to go to achieve the level penetration enjoyed by other open source technologies like JBoss, Apache and MySQL.
Market research firm IDC pegs BI as a $4bn market, with reporting being one of the fastest growing segments.
