The Company

Jaspersoft offers the most widely used open source business intelligence software in the world, with millions of downloads, over 8,000 commercial customers in 96 countries, and a community of over 85,000 members. The Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite includes products for production reporting, operational reporting, dashboard-driven end-user query and reporting, data analysis, and data integration. The Jaspersoft suite can be deployed either stand-alone or as an embedded business intelligence solution in any application. Jaspersoft is based in San Francisco and is backed by leading venture capital firms Morgenthaler Ventures, DCM, Partech International, Scale Venture Partners, and SAP Ventures.


Challenge

The former JasperForge infrastructure was comprised of three components, a series of content management modules coupled together to deliver a consistent look and feel along with instance-wide support for forums, news, and downloads; a developer forge using an enterprise-oriented application for project instantiation and collaborative software development tools; and a layer of static html content to bind the other two components. Jaspersoft launched JasperForge, the first, and now leading, open source business development community site in 2006. In two-years, the JasperForge community grew to over 85,000 users, and downloads of the community edition for the leading application for open source business intelligence more than tripled. "Unfortunately, the JasperForge infrastructure was limited in its ability to keep pace with the rapid growth of a vibrant open source community. Moreover, the vision for the incumbent solution was not compatible with the goals of a modern open source community of users, partners, vendors, and developers. Like most ‘roll-your-own’ solutions for collaborative commercial open source development, the solution lacked single sign-on, unified search, and a consistent look and feel and user experience. As is the case with all enterprise-focused applications for collaborative software development, the application for community project support was focused on supporting complex corporate workflows and deep tool functions in an environment that was costly to brand, complex to support, and lacked the roadmap and vision to cater to the unique needs of a rapidly-growing commercial open source community"
- Nick Halsey
Vice President, Marketing, Jaspersoft.


Options

Jaspersoft evaluated two options to create the new infrastructure for the Jasper Forge community website. One option involved an aggressively enhanced ‘roll-your-own’ approach that would require extensive custom development over an extended period of time; the other required a stepped-up commitment to a proprietary platform technology that would mandate a significant sustained investment. To Realizing neither approach facilitated the longer-term vision and goals of JasperForge, Jaspersoft entered into a partnership with Essentia to help create a platform for commercial open source development that was a generational leap-ahead of any available option. Jaspersoft worked closely with Essentia to create EssentiaESP and to leverage the superior capabilities of the new platform for the benefit of their community.



Solution

The EssentiaESP facilitates collaborative commercial open source development with a secure environment
that unifies software development, communication, social networking, content management, community management, commerce, CRM integration, and analytics and tracking. Access to the system is controlled
via a centralized role and permission system. EssentiaESP consists of:

• Collaborative development tools for version control, issue tracking, and file release

• Communication tools for document sharing, wiki, blogs, news, and mailing lists

• Social networking tools for discussions, user communication, surveys, and tagging

• Site and project level content management

• Advanced banners, commerce, and dynamic cataloging

• Marketing and tracking tool integration with customizable tracking codes

• Unique Ecosystem Enablement for rapid community on-boarding

• Centralized, robust framework



Results

Essentia managed every aspect of migration from the three existing JasperForge infrastructures to the EssentiaESP environment and provides on-going on-demand delivery of the JasperForge environment from a SAS-70 certified datacenter. SaaS delivery ensures Jaspersoft can continue to build a successful open source business intelligence community and not have to be distracted by the day-to-day development, delivery, and ongoing support of the environment. Today, EssentiaESP provides a rich, dynamic content environment to power modern community and commerce capabilities.



EssentiaESP Key features

• Rich content creation for nearly every project artifact;

• CMS support with design templates for easy branding and customization;

• Banner advertising with built-in impression and click rate data;

• Web2.0 site look and feel with a consistent user experience across tools, projects, community, content, and administration;

• Affinity project registration and partner listing to support an extended community of partners, resellers, contractors, developers, and users;

• Discussion group projects and community communication to enable social networking across regions, technologies, and companies;

• Project templates to drive quick and easy project creation;

• Mailing lists that capture every action of every tool;

• Google-searchable forums and other project artifacts to increase organic search results;

• CRM integration with Salesforce.com and related AppExchange solutions (SugarCRM integration is also supported);

• Marketing automation support via Manticore Technology; and configurable site-wide analytics support for
any tracking tool, including Google Analytics and Omniture.