Tibco Acquires Jaspersoft for $185 Million
Tibco Software announced late yesterday its plan to acquire privately-held open source business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft for $185 million. Under Tibco's ownership, the current plan is to keep the JasperSoft's BI brand intact.
“While Jaspersoft is no longer an independent company, we’re pleased that our business will continue in a very similar way as part of Tibco Software,” Jim Bell, Jaspersoft's CMO, told Enterprise Apps Today. “The brand name, products, open source strategy, customer relationships and employees are all a part of the value Tibco saw in Jaspersoft, and the plan is to keep these all intact.”
Bell added that the go-forward plan for Jaspersoft within Tibco is to share best practices, discuss alignment in product roadmaps and go-to-market strategy over the coming weeks and months.
Ivan Casanova, VP of Marketing at Tibco, noted that he was unable to comment about any other vendors his company might have looked at as a potential business intelligence acquisition target.
Integration and Customer Overlap
“We can say our decision to team with Jaspersoft was a direct result of Jaspersoft’s monumental strengths and leadership in embedded analytics and SaaS applications, which we saw as a perfect complement to our Spotfire product line, which provides visual analytics and data discovery capabilities,” Casanova said. “In addition, Jaspersoft’s commercial open-source business model perfectly complements our go-to-market approach and supports our strategic objective to support the breadth of buying segments and customer opportunities in the BI market.”
Since Tibco's Spotfire technology and Jaspersoft are aimed at very different analytics use cases, Casanova added, they don’t have a lot of direct customer overlap.
“In addition, Jaspersoft’s strength is in SMB/departmental and OEM sales, while Tibco has a higher concentration of enterprise customers,” Casanova said. “While we certainly have some joint customers, we’re confident that they’ll see significant value as two offerings become more integrated.”
One of Jaspersoft's open source rivals is business intelligence vendor Pentaho. Pentaho Chairman and CEO Quentin Gallivan noted in a statement that the Tibco acquisition of Jaspersoft is additional validation that the business analytics market is continuing to bifurcate — with more traditional departmental BI on the one hand, and Big Data-driven date orchestration and analytics on the other side.
“Tibco has added a low-cost open source reporting capability to its portfolio to address the SMB BI market, a market we view as continuing to commoditize,” Gallivan stated.
Open Source Model
As part of Tibco, the plan is continue the commercial open source model that has served Jaspersoft throughout its lifespan as an independent entity.
“As we look forward together as a combined company we will continue to pursue the Jaspersoft commercial open source strategy, and Jaspersoft will continue to support the more than 400,000 community members through their open source offerings,” Casanova said. “This open source model is an area of continued and increased investment for Jaspersoft and additional Tibco product sets, as well.”
Jaspersoft's Bell noted that his company's product roadmap will remain substantially the same under Tibco's ownerships.
“As the technology teams begin to share more information, and determine the best integration points to help our customers succeed, we expect to see the addition of some of those elements to the Jaspersoft product roadmap,” Bell said. “Overall, Jaspersoft’s commitment to offering a world-class embeddable reporting and analytics platform is only amplified by this acquisition.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
