Jinfonet Hones JReport with Visual Analysis, Big Data Connections

July 9, 2013 Alex Woodie

Jinfonet Software last week unveiled a new version of JReport, its Java-based reporting and analysis tool. Version 12 brings a new in-memory visual analysis features, as well as support for big data platforms like Amazon RedShift.

JReport is a lightweight suite of business intelligence tools that is often embedded into other Web applications. The software–which not only can pull data from DB2 for i but run on the IBM i server itself–includes a drag-and-drop report designer, a report distribution and management tool, an ad-hoc reporting and multi-dimensional module, a dashboard module, and mobile interfaces.

The Rockville, Maryland, software company introduced the concept of visualization with JReport 11, which it unveiled a year ago. Version 11 also marked the launch of the new JDashboard module.

The concept of visualization is increasingly being utilized in business intelligence systems to help humans discover patterns and see trends that might otherwise remain hidden in big data sets.

To that end, Jinfonet has bolstered its visualization capabilities in version 12 with the new visual analysis feature. Visual analysis builds on the visualization capabilities introduced in version 11, and enables “self-service interactive data analysis powered by high performance in-memory cubes,” the company says.

Specifically, Jinfonet says the visual analysis feature gives report developers and end users the capability to “easily transform their data into rich visualization.” Users can easily adjust their visualizations to provide faster discovery of actionable information, the company says. The visualizations can be published using JDashboard.

Version 12 also brings expanded support for big data platforms, including Amazon RedShift, a petabyte-scale data warehouse service that lives in the Amazon Web Services cloud. Jinfonet already supported JReport running on the AWS cloud, so the expansion of support to RedShift was not a giant leap.

Additional big data platforms supported in JReport 12 include MongoDB and Apache Hive. According to Jinfonet, customers can use MongoDB and Apache Hive to drive “high performance data visualization and analysis using JReport in-memory cubes and detail data caches.”

The world of big data and visual analysis is upon us, and Jinfonet is working to keep its software up to date with the changes. “Building innovative ways to analyze data with connections to advanced data storage gives customers a competitive advantage in quickly visualizing their business information,” Jinfonet CEO Bing Yao says in a press release.