Last week Jaspersoft announced their latest release 3.7 and Enterprise addition.  Overall, the expansion of Jaspersoft’s Enterprise addition to the mix of traditional open source BI highlights the direction of the BI market overall. Companies are starting to look for alternative solutions that provide strong features and functionality but that do not require large implementation and maintenance costs (in comparison with some traditional BI offerings).  Although open source continues to remain free for the developer community, because of the ability to develop solutions more quickly, open source BI providers are starting to focus on commercial offerings to give companies the benefits of continual improvements to solutions and easy maintenance. And on the side of organizations, many are beginning to evaluate open source BI within the mix of their overall business intelligence software evaluations.

Here are some of the highlights of Jaspersoft’s announcement:

• configurable in-memory, allowing end users/IT to define where the processing gets done
• new features including partial pivots, advanced sorting, dynamic slicing and filtering, etc.
• advanced visualizations and animations using Adobe PDF and HTML
• extended Web services
• online/hosted context sensitive help