Business intelligence firm Jaspersoft launched Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite 4.2, the latest version of its product that comes with one major addition: an open source mobile BI iOS software development kit.  The release is the first of its kind in this industry, according to the company.  This is a pretty thought-out move considering that both big data and mobile are involved – two of the hottest trends in the enterprise today. Another highlight is that customers can deploy app(s) for employees using both the iPhone and iPad.

“Jaspersoft is giving BI Builders more freedom to choose the right mobile BI environment for their business-critical information. We know the workforce wants an elegant, easy-to-use BI interface, but mobile BI is rarely a one-size-fits-all solution…” says Brian Gentile, CEO of Jaspersoft.

In addition to just display scaling, the Objective-C SDK also comes with REST-based APIs to reduce development time and expense as much as possible. It also includes a sample app customers can build on, and an interesting UI feature for the end-user. Ad hoc reporting is simplified thanks to built-in visualization methods as well as more advanced functions.

BI, and big data analytics in particular have seen a lot of growth in the past two years or so. This has attracted a lot of solutions makers to spawn a slew of subcategories, including open-source analytics and Hadoop. We’ve had some updates from here as well recently: Karmasphere recently unveiled Karmasphere Analyst Big Data, which offers developers a convenient all-inclusive interface to work with.

Increase enterprise spending on BI is already a trend, according to the latest survey by SnapLogic. Out of the companies that participated in the study 40 percent said they will invest in BI and analytics in 2012.