« Back

Red Hat joined the Chicago venture capital firm Adams Street Partners recently to invest in Jaspersoft, a company that produces reporting and business intelligence software. The amount Red Hat invested wasn't disclosed but the round came to a total of $12.5 million, an amount that was larger than each of the two preceding rounds.

The investment illustrates the growing partnership between the San Francisco supplier of open source business intelligence applications and the Raleigh, N.C., supplier of Enterprise Linux.

In June Red Hat announced it was embedding Jaspersoft's Business Intelligence Suite into its Red Hat Network, which manages a business' Linux distributions, automatically provisioning end users, updating them or applying subscription renewals. The Jaspersoft suite will be used in the Satellite version of Red Hat Network, the one that's installed on premises and behind the firewall of a company using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat customers want "to have a wider variety of prebuilt reports as well as create custom reports," said Katrinka McCallum, VP of Red Hat's Management and Security business, in the June 19 announcement.

Jaspersoft's Nick Halsey, VP of marketing, said in an interview that Red Hat's decision to invest "was not just a financial decision. It's part of our evolving partnership." Red Hat wants key information from administering Linux subscriptions to be available for reporting and analysis to ease the pain of employing Linux on a large scale.

The Jaspersoft tools optimize Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers by producing detailed, customized reports for problem management and delivering information on license configurations, provisioning, and downtime and uptime averages. System administrators can manage a larger base of users with such information readily available.

Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite v3.1 was announced Dec. 9 with enhanced charting and visualization capabilities. Developers can tap the charting capability to build a chart theme into data being displayed to reflect what Linux system administrators are most interested in, such as system uptime. Before release 3.1, administrators would have customized the charts themselves to reflect with specific programming commands. The themes can be applied to bar, 3-D bar, pie, XY line, and XY area type charts, among others.

The new release also has a new public API for tapping mapping and geospatial presentations as well as charts. The 3.1 release has also been certified to work with Sun Microsystems Java application server Glassfish.

SAP is a previous investor in Jaspersoft, as well as Morgenthaler Ventures, DCM, Partech International, and Scale Venture Partners.

The road for open source BI software has been an uphill battle. With growing capabilities in a strong segment, vendors are looking past developer markets to business end users. InformationWeek has published an independent analysis of this topic.

« Back