Jaspersoft has entered the data visualization market with the newest release of its flagship reporting platform, which includes capabilities similar to those other vendors in space have been offering for a while. Namely, Jaspersoft 5 comes with a built-in “metadata view” of different data sources that users can easily put together in a browser.

“The Jaspersoft 5 architecture delivers advanced visualization features much like Tableau, but entirely inside a web browser using HTML5,” said Brian Gentile, Jaspersoft CEO.  “In total, we provide a web-scale reporting and analytics platform that can be delivered inside of any business application or process, on all major devices, and at a fraction of the cost of any major competitor.”

V5.0 features a few other enhancements as well. These include a new columnar in-memory engine that’s compatible with terabyte-scale relational, OLAP and big data workloads, as well as support for Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services.

Jaspersoft also features more end user customization: the core column sorting, filtering and table formatting capabilities have been augmented with the addition of conditional formatting and cross-tab sorting. The corresponding enhancements on the admin side arrive in the form of new server monitoring tools that provide more visibility into system health and usage trend.

Lastly, this new release introduces improved API access that makes it easier for web developers to integrate Jaspersoft smarts into their own apps.

The BI vendor has been working on tightening its bonds with the ecosystem long before today’s launch.  Jaspersoft said back in August that it’s working with DataStax to embed its dashboarding technology into the latter’s commercial Cassandra distribution, underscoring the goal of making big data more accessible for both data scientists and decision makers.