Analyst Perspectives

Tibco’s recent acquisition of Jaspersoft helps the company fill out its portfolio of business intelligence (BI) and reporting software in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Tibco already offered a range of products in BI and analytics including Tibco Spotfire, an established product for visual data discovery. Jaspersoft and its open source Java reporting tool JasperReports have been around since 2001, and the company says it has 16 million product downloads worldwide, 140,000 production deployments and 2,000 commercial customers in 100 countries. Jaspersoft received attention recently for its partnership with Amazon Marketplace and the ability to embed its system into applications using a credit card and a few simple configuration steps. This example of embedding the technology is an area that Tibco knows well from its history of integrating its technology into enterprise architecture across the planet.

The acquisition is significant given today’s advancements in the Business Intelligence market and the need for tools to serve a variety of users. In some ways their technologies serve the same users – analysts and business users trying to make decisions with data but how they approach it and support a broad set of roles and responsibilities is different.  Tibco Spotfire, Tibco’s approach to business analytics, serves for analytics and visualization with specializing in visual discovery and data exploration while Jaspersoft addresses the query and analyze, reporting, dashboards and other aspects of BI. According to our benchmark research on information optimization, the capabilities business users most often need are to drill into information within applications (37%), search for data (36%) and collaborate (27%). For analysts, the most necessary capabilities are extracting data (39%), designing and integrating metrics (37%) and developing policies and rules for access (34%). With Jaspersoft, Tibco can address both groups and also can embed intelligence and reporting capabilities into operationally oriented environments across range of business applications.

The acquisition makes sense in that more capabilities are needed to address the expanding scope of business intelligence and analytics. In practice, it will be interesting to see how the open source community and culture of Jaspersoft meshes with the culture of Tibco’s Spotfire division. For now, Jaspersoft will continue as a separate division so business likely will continue as usual until management decides specific areas of integration. With respect to development efforts, it will be critical to blend the discovery capabilities of Tibco Spotfire with Jaspersoft’s reporting which will be a formidable challenge.  Another key to success will be how Tibco integrates both with the capabilities from Extended Results, a mobile business intelligence provider Tibco bought in 2013. Mobility is an area where Ventana Research found Jaspersoft significantly lacking, so the Extended Results capabilities should prove useful. Finally, Tibco’s event-enabled infrastructure will likely play a key role as the company continues to invest in operational intelligence for event-focused information gathering and delivery. Our operational intelligence research has found a lack of integration from business intelligence like that of Jaspersoft with event streams like from Tibco to be a major challenge in over half (51%) of organizations. This is a potential opportunity for Tibco as it looks at future integration of the technologies.

The Jaspersoft acquisition is not surprising given recent changes in the BI market. The category, which just a few years ago was considered mature and well-defined, is expanding to include areas such as analytic discovery tools, advanced analytics and big data. The union of Tibco Spotfire, which primarily targets line-of-business professionals from analysts to knowledge worksers, and Jaspersoft, a more IT-centered company, reflects the need for the industry to bridge a divide that exists in many organizations where IT is publishing dashboards and reports to business.  The challenge of using information across business and IT was found in our latest research, revealed in our information optimization benchmark research, shows that information management these days is most often (in 42% of organizations) a joint responsibility of IT and the lines of business , although IT is involved in some capacity in four-fifths of them. It remains to be seen whether the joint company can take on major competitors that have far more cash resources and take a similar approach.

Preliminary indicators show a good fit between these two organizations. Customers from each will be introduced to important new tools and capabilities from the other. One of the first likely moves for Tibco will be to introduce the 2,000 commercial customers and global presence of Jaspersoft to the broader portfolio. We advise those customers to evaluate what Tibco offers, especially those from Tibco Spotfire which continues to be a leader in the visual data discovery market. Before investing, however, customers and prospects should demand clarity on the company’s plans for technical integration of analytics and how these will fit with organizations long-term business intelligence and analytics roadmaps. Tibco customers migrating to the cloud should investigate the work Jaspersoft is doing with companies like Amazon and consider whether the embedded approach to interactive reporting can fit with their analytics, cloud and application strategies.

The opportunity for Tibco to advance business analytics is significant through this acquisition but it has historically not been as progressive in its marketing and sales of analytics compared to others in the market. The demand for visual discovery and big data analytics has grown dramatically with over three quarters of organizations according to our research has shown as overall important. Big data analytics and visualization is an area that Spotfire had innovated before Tibco acquisition but has not seen its fair share of growth with the buying trends. The opportunity for Tibco to provide analytics and BI that can further leverage the entire Tibco portfolio of integration, event processing, cloud and social collaboration software products is upon them, let’s see how they do. It now needs to supercharge its analytics efforts significantly with leveraging its new products from Jaspersoft.

Regards,

Tony Cosentino

VP and Research Director