Jaspersoft has created the most widely deployed open source business intelligence software in the world, with over 3.5 million downloads, and a community of over 70,000 developers. They target the “under-served” who attempt to perform business analytics without the appropriate software tools, or the “over-charged” who pay tremendous amounts for proprietary software. I had the opportunity to speak with Brian Gentile, President & CEO of Jaspersoft, who formerly ran Developer Relations at Sun and Apple. Brian covers a range of interesting topics, including the challenges of being a commercial open source company, and the story about how the JasperReports and iReport creators and their open source projects were discovered and launched commercially. He also provides advice to other entrepreneurs on how to successfully build a community of developers. To learn more, visit http://www.jaspersoft.com/ or http://jasperforge.org/.

Jaspersoft recently had a big announcement about a new release of their software that integrates additional functionality and an interactive Web 2.0 interface. Check out OStatic’s post with all the details about this new release!

UPDATE: Due to recent business travel for my day job as an engineer, and a very busy interview schedule, I will not be posting a video the week of June 25. You’ll love what I’ve got coming up next, though, so stay tuned, and be sure to subscribe so you can always automatically receive the latest updates on the show!

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Ruby on Rails is a tremendously popular development framework, making it dead-simple to create web applications. However, it does have its deployment challenges, but that’s where Engine Yard comes in. This San Francisco based startup will handle the entire process of deploying your Rails app, which includes reliable and scalable hosting, operations, and sysadmin/DBA support 24/7, so you can literally go out drinking on launch night instead of staring at your monitor waiting for something to go wrong.

In this video, Tom Mornini, Co-Founder and CTO, and Lance Walley, Co-Founder and CEO, discuss Engine Yard’s tech, Ruby on Rails misconceptions, and Twitter’s scalability issues. They also share their secrets to VC selection, negotiation, and partnering, so be sure to tune in.

7/13/08 UPDATE: The news JUST hit the blogosphere that Engine Yard closed a $15M round of financing…congrats to the team! Check out the scoop on TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Ruby Inside, and of course Ezra Zygmuntowicz’s post (the other founder of EY) with all the details…and if there are other good posts, leave a comment and let me know!

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Today’s data centers, web farms, and even Web 2.0 overnight sensations can require hundreds of thousands of servers to operate, which creates a challenging software management problem. FastScale has developed an innovative solution to this problem; their Composer Suite automatically builds lightweight software environments by determining the minimum amount of OS components required to support an application, and then provisions these environments in seconds. Lynn LeBlanc, Co-Founder and CEO, discusses the details of the company’s technology and business strategy, and also talks about her career path and how it led to her involvement in server infrastructure manageability. The interview concludes with a product demo by Richard Offer, the company’s Co-Founder and VP of Engineering.

Be sure to leave a comment and let me know what you think…I’d love your ideas and suggestions for future episodes of TalkTech!

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