Business Intelligence Made Easy for Ingres Corp. with JasperSoft

REVIEWER: Doug Harr, chief information officer for Ingres Corp.

BACKGROUND: Built on more than 25 years of technology investment, Ingres is a leader in software and service innovation, providing the enterprise with proven reliability combined with the value and flexibility of open source.

PLATFORM: Ingres deployed the JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite on Linux and on the Ingres open source database management system, integrating it with its modern software as a service (SaaS) approach to IT.

PROBLEM SOLVED: The JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite enabled Ingres to take advantage of the flexibility and fit of the best-of-breed SaaS enterprise applications we have deployed for financials and sales automation, along with the power of on-premise advanced reporting and analytics. Ingres needed a way to centralize all of the corporate data and reach into it with powerful and customizable reporting tools. JasperSoft helped the Ingres team put an end to the task of sifting through spreadsheets to deliver critical data to key line-of-business managers in sales and marketing.

PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: The JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite provides graphical and ad hoc report design interfaces, online analytical processing analysis, extract, transform and load functionality for data integration and a Java reporting library. The JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite provides a wide range of operational reporting and BI functionality, including a high-performance interactive report server, a graphical report creation tool, and a pixel-perfect reporting system with dashboards, tables, crosstabs and charts. Ingres can create, store, schedule, distribute, share, drill down and interact with reports. Prior to the JasperSoft BI solution, the senior vice president of sales at Ingres would download sales history data from Salesforce to his PC and then build pivot tables. Now, sales executives have the data they need whenever they need it. We plan to build Salesforce dashboards using the JasperSoft BI Suite with a goal of better functionality than what is available within Salesforce. This may eventually eliminate the need for some of our existing Salesforce seats for Ingres workers who need read-only access to the data.

STRENGTHS: JasperSoft has used open and common standards for building the toolset. Ingres will benefit from the strong and extensive community that JasperSoft has built around its BI tools. It was very easy for a developer who had never used JasperSoft to get up to speed within hours. There were no long training sessions. Ingres was able to deliver reports - and value - very quickly out of the gate.

WEAKNESSES: There is an opportunity to spruce up the user interface. The ad hoc reporting capability is great, but it probably can be taken to the next level.

SELECTION CRITERIA: The internal Ingres team did market research to identify the leading open source and BI players. We had heard of JasperSoft and decided to look at the company. They were easy to do business with and had sharp and experienced people. The partnership is going very well. Ingres needed to buy a robust reporting and analytics solution on a subscription basis, and JasperSoft fit the bill. In fact, Ingres built JasperSoft into its own Icebreaker BI Appliance for Salesforce, which combines a Linux base with Ingres’ database management system and the JasperSoft suite of applications.

DELIVERABLES: The biggest deliverable is a rapidly deployed analytics solution. In addition, advanced reporting is a key deliverable - reports that include data from multiple enterprise systems, financial data alongside customer relationship management data, etc. The JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite delivers advanced trended reports and analysis cubes that exceeds our expectations.

VENDOR SUPPORT: JasperSoft has stellar support. It has been an incredible experience. When we wanted help with analysis cubes, we turned to JasperSoft’s consulting organization and had an advanced sales analysis cube within a week - proving tremendous value in a short period of time.

DOCUMENTATION: The documentation is easy to follow and understand.