How It All Began

Saving The World From The Oppression Of Complex, Heavyweight Business Intelligence

An old English proverb exclaims, “Need taught him wit,” an adage that is equally true in Bucharest, Romania, where, in 2001, Java developer and eventual Jaspersoft co-founder Teodor Danciu needed to embed reporting capability in an application.

His first choices for the task were proprietary solutions, like Crystal Reports, but the software either presented technical challenges when integrating with the Java platform, or the products were too expensive.

So, Teodor set out to build his own Java-based reporting engine and library. He posted his initial efforts on SourceForge where they were enthusiastically received and refined. The result was JasperReports: J for Java, and, Jasper is a crystal, said to provide stability, security and balance.

But good reporting tools need a good visual editor for creating sophisticated reports and report templates. Back to work! Too much work as it turned out. In 2002, Giulio Toffoli, a JasperReports user and member of the open source community, was looking for a better way to design reports, so he created iReport, a visual report designer for JasperReports. Developers who needed easily embeddable immediately embraced both
projects.

By this time, the Business Intelligence market was ripe for disruption by a commercially-supported open source alternative. In 2004 Teodor, Giulio, and key members of their development teams joined forces with a San Francisco-based company to create Jaspersoft. Not long after, Jaspersoft added a server-based reporting tool-JasperServer-to the product line. It greatly extended the capabilities of both JasperReports and iReport. Next, full multi-dimensional (OLAP-based) features were added with JasperAnalysis. In 2006 all of the pieces were brought together in a single integrated solution: The Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite.

Today, Jaspersoft’s open source business intelligence is the world’s most widely used BI software, with over 10 million product downloads worldwide and more than 12,500 commercial customers in 100 countries. Jaspersoft provides a web-based, open and modular approach to the evolving business intelligence needs of the enterprise and is the only BI vendor enabling true multi-tenancy while providing a common platform for on-premise, virtualized, SaaS and Cloud deployments. Jaspersoft’s products span the continuum of core BI requirements, including reporting, analysis, dashboards and mash-ups, data analysis, and data integration. Its BI software is updated constantly by a community of more than 130,000 registered members working on more than 350 projects, which represents the world’s largest business intelligence community. The company is based in San Francisco and is backed by leading venture capital firms Morgenthaler Ventures, DCM, Partech International, Scale Venture Partners, SAP Ventures, Adams Street Partners and Red Hat.