Some interesting announcements from JasperSoft (open source business intelligence) this morning. They announced the release of JasperServer, their first standalone server product (they used to just offer a pluggable reporting library), but what caught my attention was their announcement of JasperIntelligence, a suite of open source BI products aimed at carving out a piece of the market for more full-service BI. This looks like a move to get the attention of customers who can't afford the BI tools from proprietary big guns like Microsoft, but still have a real need for good reporting and analytics - the mid-sized enterprise customers, the departmental workgroups on limited budgets etc.
It would make sense if more open source companies went after these segments, the customers who don't have the bank accounts or the man-hours for the proprietary alternatives. As open source companies develop more complete architectures, they're going to have to get better at winning that level of customer, where they don't have to compete as aggressively with closed source firms. By feeding on these middle-range markets, open source firms will further grow and mature until and mount a challenge to the big-time players in their space.
Posted by Dave Rosenberg on April 23, 2006 09:19 PM
