A San Francisco-headquartered open source software company that claims to have the widest deployment of business intelligence (BI) software in the world, is in the process of establishing its EMEA headquarters in Dublin.
JasperSoft recently reported more than 80,000 deployments worldwide and boasts the largest open source BI community with over 65,000 registered developers co-operating on 300-plus Jasper-related projects.
Siliconrepublic.com has learned that the company has established its EMEA headquarters at East Point Business Park in Dublin with an initial eight employees, with plans to increase headcount as the business grows.
The company’s chief executive, Brian Gentile, explained that the four-year-old company’s technology grew out of an open source software project called Jasper Reports, which was developed in Romania in 2003 by Jasper Danciu.
Gentile said the company, which counts software giant SAP as an investor, will be cash neutral by next year and counts government organisations, large universities and colleges, manufacturing firms and financial institutions among its 8,300 paying customers.
“Our appeal is that we are low-cost, amounting to literally a fraction of what other BI software vendors would charge.”
Gentile said most of the jobs in Dublin would consist of software sales, pre-sales and professional services people. He added that the company is in discussions with IDA Ireland about future expansion plans.
JasperSoft is the second major e-business open source player to set up in Dublin in the past year. SugarCRM is also in the process of establishing an EMEA headquarters in Dublin.
“The open source software world is a disruptive influence on the existing software world. Companies like JasperSoft and SugarCRM are going back to the software world of 30 years ago where you bought software just to get the source code and it was considered important to improve on it.
“It is only in the past 30 years that software has been closed. We found that to be quite stifling. Software is truly about collaboration and we aim to bring that methodology back to computer science. It’s all about collaboration.
“While I sit here, there are 68,000 people in the open source community willing to help me,” Gentile said.
By John Kennedy
