HCLSoftware to acquire Jaspersoft for reported $240M – News

HCLSoftware Inc. plans to acquire Jaspersoft Inc., a provider of business intelligence software, in an all-cash deal reportedly valued at $240 million.

The company announced the transaction on Monday. In conjunction, HCLSoftware disclosed that it’s buying Wobby, an early-stage startup with an artificial intelligence tool for querying data warehouses. The transaction is reportedly worth $5.3 million.

India-based HCLSoftware sells several dozen software products for tasks ranging from finding code vulnerabilities to optimizing network equipment. According to the company, its applications are used by more than 20,000 organizations including most of the Fortune 100. HCLSoftware is a unit of HCL Technologies Ltd., one of the world’s largest technology service providers.

Jaspersoft, for its part, is a unit of software conglomerate Cloud Software Group Inc. The latter company was formed in 2022 through the merger of Citrix Systems Inc. and Tibco Software Inc., a major player in the data management market. Tibco bought Jaspersoft in 2014 for $185 million.

Jaspersoft sells a business intelligence platform that enables developers to embed data visualizations in their applications. A startup that sells store management software, for example, could create a dashboard that displays shopper buying patterns. Jaspersoft provides its software in an open-source edition and a paid version that includes additional features.

The paid version can generate interactive graphs that enable users to slice and dice data. It also supports more types of visualizations than the free tier, including maps. Developers can speed up the dashboard design workflow by creating templates called externalized style sheets. An externalized style sheet can be reused across projects and makes it possible to update all the dashboards that use it at once.

Under the hood, Jaspersoft uses SQL to collect the data it visualizes. It can cache frequently used datasets, which removes the need to run the same SQL queries multiple times and thereby lowers hardware resources.

Applications usually keep data in secondary storage such as flash and move it to RAM only when it’s actively used. Jaspersoft uses an in-memory engine that keeps data in RAM from the outset. That avoids the delays associated with pulling records from flash, which speeds up queries.

HCLSoftware will use Jaspersoft’s technology to enhance the Actian Data Intelligence Platform, a data management toolkit it obtained through an earlier acquisition. The software helps companies remove errors from the data they visualize in business intelligence dashboards. It can filter duplicate records, missing spreadsheet and other quality issues. The software also eases certain related tasks such as optimizing query performance.

The Wobby acquisition is likewise designed to enhance the Actian Data Intelligence Platform. According to HCLSoftware, the plan is to add AI agents that will enable users to query datasets with natural language prompts. 

“Our customers want business intelligence solutions that can deliver consistent analytics and reports and offer flexibility to fully own the analytics experience,” said Marc Potter, the portfolio general manager of HCLSoftware’s data and AI group.

The company expects to complete the acquisitions within six months.

Image: Jaspersoft