I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Karl Van den Bergh, vice president of product strategy at Jaspersoft.

Our discussion touched on several facets of the emerging cloud BI market…

Erin: How is the cloud BI market growing?

Karl: Great question. A recent IDC (News - Alert) report indicates that business intelligence (BI) and analytics in the cloud is a fast growing market with a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.4 percent through 2013. We've seen that this significant shift to a cloud hosting infrastructure is due to the exorbitant costs associated with maintenance and general upkeep of an on-premise infrastructure made up of bloated proprietary suites. The cloud offers a real cost-saving advantage for companies who are already seeing razor thin margins and need to become as efficient as possible while leveraging a solution that can still meet business needs. 

Erin: What are the best practices in cloud BI?

Karl: Jaspersoft's experience with more than 100 successful cloud BI deployments has made us realize that a partnership, best-of-breed approach to cloud BI is the best way to go. BI as a service through on-demand SaaS (News - Alert) deployments are generally singular offerings that are overstretched, offer limited flexibility, and generally need to be built from the ground-up, resulting in costly down-time and high implementation costs. One of the best practices that we've established from our multiple launches is that customers need to have a cloud hosting-enhanced BI solution with a lean framework. Jaspersoft's lean architecture based on web-based open standards coupled with experts in cloud management and BI consulting results in a proven solution than can meet a myriad of business needs. 

Erin: What does Jaspersoft’s “cloud platform and partner” program offer that others don’t?

Karl: Jaspersoft’s strength lies in its core offering, namely a BI platform that acts as general framework that is able to accommodate any data model that a customer might need. Our SaaS ISV and SI partners then customize this platform to deliver a complete BI solution that is able to bridge that last mile of customer needs. Traditional SaaS BI vendors haven’t realized this and continue to try to sell their BI platform directly to end users -- which misses this last mile. Those that have survived (and some like LucidEra haven’t) end up having to provide these vertical or functional customizations themselves which limits their ability to scale their business.

Jaspersoft offers a proven platform enhanced with best-of-breed cloud management and BI consulting. This flexible model allows for our partners to do what they do best without wasting time and effort trying to solve problems that are beyond their domain of expertise. By relying on our ISV network, we at Jaspersoft are free to focus on our core offering and make our product the best out there. We have come a long way and are proud to say that the quality of our core BI platform allows us to deploy anywhere, whether on-premise, in the private or public cloud or a hybrid of any.

Erin: How is Jaspersoft planning to come out on top?

Karl: Jaspersoft was already ahead of the game 3 years ago when we first signed on our first cloud BI customer. With each additional customer deployment we looked at what worked best for different types of organizations and reincorporated that knowledge to continue to improve our own cloud BI offering. By expanding our partnership network we expect to engage with other best-of-breed companies whose technologies align well with ours so that we may continue to offer the best cloud BI deployment. 

Our partners will help us to tackle BI business problems holistically while allowing us to focus on what we do best, a core BI platform that is able to scale, can be implemented in a variety of deployment scenarios, and has rich reporting, analysis and dashboarding capabilities.