Jaspersoft Touts Mobile Business Intelligence

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Not that long ago, enterprise software such as business intelligence apps resided exclusively on hard drives within the corporate perimeter. Jaspersoft is one of many vendors riding the trend toward mobile BI platforms.

Jaspersoft is expanding its business intelligence software for Apple’s iPhone and iPad. The Jaspersoft 4.2 release also provides an open source software development kit to help build mobile BI apps.

“The open source mobile SDK is for embedded apps,” Jim Bell, chief marketing officer at JasperSoft, told InternetNews.com. “We know that we won’t be able to provide a one-size-fits-all solution, particularly for mobile devices.”

Bell said the SDK is for Apple iOS devices, including the iPad and iPhone. With the SDK, developers can customize the mobile look and feel of a business intelligence application. Bell said iOS is Jaspersoft’s first platform for the mobile SDK and the company is currently looking at developing one for the Android platform in 2012.

For the iPhone, Jaspersoft has a native app, while the iPad implementation is not native and instead uses a browser-based interface. Mike Boyarski, director of product marketing at Jaspersoft, said Jaspersoft 4.2 works well in a browser-based environment thanks to all the HTML5 work his company has done. HTML5 is the next-generation web standard that enables more interactivity for browsers.

Boyarski said Jaspersoft did a lot of work to make Jaspersoft 4.2 behave like a native app on the iPad.

“We removed all the scrollbars from our application, it’s all pinch, zoom and scroll-based,” Boyarski said. “We really think that’s a preferred environment for IT groups that don’t want to get into the hassle of managing native apps.”

Native apps represent a challenge to IT groups in terms of both deployment and applying policies across different devices. That said, when it comes to the iPhone, Jaspersoft is taking a different approach, using a native app that uses objective-c code.

Looking beyond the mobile versions, Jaspersoft is also adding new custom filtering capabilities in the 4.2 release.

“These are advanced filters for ad-hoc reporting and allow you to link multiple parameters in a single view,” Bell said.

The Jaspersoft 4.2 release is the second incremental release in the 4.x branch that debuted earlier this year.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

Read the rest about Smartphone security at Enterprise Apps Today.