JasperETL Closes Open Source BI Loop

Open source business intelligence vendor JasperSoft today rolled out the final pillar of its business intelligence suite, JasperETL.

The release signals the final core feature release from the company, which will now focus on enhancing usability and accessibility.

ETL , which stands for Extract, Transform and Load, allows applications to take data from outside sources, turn it into something usable and then make it available for loading in a database application.

JasperSoft describes JasperETL as a technology that enables enterprises to ” move, cleanse, standardize and transform data according to their business needs.”

“Reporting, analytics and ETL are the three fundamental pillars of business intelligence,” JasperSoft CTO Barry Klawans told internetnews.com. “We’re finally rounding out the product with the third pillar.”

JasperETL includes a GUI job designer, which provides users with a graphical editor of the ETL process as well as a graphical view of transformations and complex mappings. Wizards are also a key part of the offering, making it easier for users to configure different data sources for business intelligence use.

JasperSoft didn’t build JasperETL from scratch, but rather partnered with open source vendor Talend.

“We’re basically building JasperETL on top of the Talend product,” Klawans said.

The new ETL product will become part of the Jasper Business Intelligence Suite, which includes JasperETL, JasperServer, JasperReports and JasperAnalysis. JasperServer enables users to generate BI reports either as a standalone server or as a Web services  reporting engine.

According to Klawans the major core features in JasperSoft’s business intelligence suite are now done.

“At this point we’re not planning on looking at data mining, master data model type solutions. That’s outside the scope of what we want to do,” Klawans said. “We will be focusing on increasing the feature set in areas we are in.”

One of the areas that JasperSoft’s feature set that is likely to improve is accessibility and usability. Klawans hopes to improve the user interface so the average business user can perform analytics a lot easier.

There are also plans to make JasperSoft’s business intelligence applications easier to integrate.

“I think a lot of our success is going to come from non-Java languages — Perl, PHP, Ruby — it should be easy to invoke us from those languages,” Klawans said.

“We’ve got a full Web services interface behind the scenes. We need to do a big push to show how to invoke us and use us from different environments so you can use us anywhere.”