JackBe has been in the mashup and application development business for some time and I have covered them on several occasions. The most latest was: JackBe Moves Further into Real-Time Intelligence. What originally started as an enterprise mashup platform has now evolved into a real-time (business) intelligence platform that connects directly to live data sources and delivers information in Enterprise Apps as needed by organizations.

I spoke with Rick Pitts the new CEO at JackBe, along with John Crupi, their CTO. Rick is the former president and CEO of the North and South American regions for Business Intelligence (BI) software provider QlikTech. Prior to that he was with Compaq and SAP so he brings extensive enterprise application experience.

JackBe’s Real-Time Intelligence Solution, Presto, was recently cited by Forrester Research as a “Unified Next-Generation BI” technology. In the next generation of BI, the focus is on Real-Time BI;  what is happening right now versus going back into a data warehouse to see what happened in the past.

As Rick explained, there are other aspects to their next generation approach to BI. These also include agility, and self-service enabled by ease of use. I certainly applaud this decision. Too many old school BI tools require a team of BI experts that can get between the business user who needs answers now and the datathat offers these answers.

I asked Rick how JackBe promotes self-service. He said it is a matter of what they do and what they do not do. First, they do not try to tackle data cleansing, semantic dictionaries, and deep data dives. They are consumers of data and their mashup roots help here.  They are aligned with the business being the consumer of the data. They provide dynamic data to support immediate business decisions.

Business users can decide what data they want to look at and how they want to visualize it. JackBe offers a range of visualizations. Then the business users can assemble the right views through point and click anddrag and drop which means with no programming requirements.  They want the business user to make BI decisions on their own and not be limited by the need to use specialized staff support.  Works for me.

JackBe is also expanding its mobile capabilities for increased ease of use and great self-service. They want people to be able to easily share live apps with current data rather than frozen reports through email and other channels.

Qualcomm is one of their customers and Qualcomm has an on-premise Enterprise App Store that enables employees to create personalized dashboards that meet their specific needs. People are used to the igoogle experience and collecting their own data on the Web. The Qualcomm approach allows them to do this within a secure environment.

I like JackBe’s movement from providing an enabling technology (mashups) to offering a business outcome (business Intelligence). Business intelligence is becoming increasingly strategic and  adding real-time capabilities and ease of  use are great pluses.