SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 24, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Jaspersoft, maker of the world's most widely used business intelligence (BI) software, today released insights from customers in the education sector who report using business intelligence software. BI has become an essential tool for ensuring accountability and managing student information systems in the face of unprecedented budget pressure. Jaspersoft BI has become a popular solution among schools and universities that face shrinking budgets and increasing demands for better performance in the wake of No Child Left Behind, and local and state mandates on reporting school test results.

In the U.S. today, schools are faced with a rising cost of education throughout primary, secondary and higher education institutions, combined with a need to show improvement in educational achievement. More students are seeking financial aid to pay for higher education costs, and competition for admittance into top schools is fierce, often resulting in lotteries. These circumstances in the education sector have led to demands for greater accountability and reporting throughout the education system, from student and teacher performance to streamlining budget and operations.

In higher education, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce report from May 2011 described this as a "productivity crisis," showing that:

Tuition costs have risen faster than median family incomes and inflation over the last decade

The U.S. is losing ground internationally dropping to 12th place in degree attainment among 25-24 year olds;

At the same time, employers are increasingly finding graduates ill prepared for today's workforce.

Customers report Jaspersoft Business Intelligence technology brings accountability to education systems, enabling faster and more accessible tracking of performance and cost:

Mark Walls, one of the founders of Illuminate Education, said, "With all of the testing in education, there is an increased need for reporting on student achievement. Users are becoming more and more data-aware and accurate and timely reporting is crucial. We chose Jaspersoft because it is agile and powerful - allowing us to quickly build and deploy reports to our end users. The reporting in Illuminate allows educators to move from data and assessment to analysis to decision-making easily and seamlessly. Whether you are working with curriculum-embedded assessments, student demographic data, state assessments, or student program data, Jaspersoft BI has allowed us to take dynamic reporting to a new level." Illuminate Education is a company that provides web based data and assessment management, student information systems, and special education systems to K-12 Education.

"Nevada State High School is experiencing the advantages of business intelligence with Jaspersoft 4 delivering real-time reporting to our principal, teachers, and counselors. Not only does BI significantly aid their strategic planning and decision-making, it delivers actionable information to administrators and faculty much faster," said Dr. John Hawk, Executive of Nevada State High School. "We chose Jaspersoft over other solutions because of its easy-to-use interface and intuitive features. Jaspersoft continues to connect to our Oracle database with functionality as we search the best ways to integrate BI into our infrastructure and operational processes at the school."

John Kearney, Director of Administrative Systems at The Commonwealth Medical College said, "The need for easy access to the school's administrative data has become quickly apparent. As with most higher education institutions, we needed to manage a broad range of functions: finance and budget, faculty development, human resources, student information and activities, admissions, fundraising and more. In a matter of weeks we were evaluating BI solutions and narrowed options to SAP and Jaspersoft. Jaspersoft's licensing model and significantly lower costs made it dramatically more affordable than the other solutions." Learn more in the Commonwealth Medical College Case Study.

Outside the U.S., academic institutions also find Jaspersoft BI solves the increased need for data management. "With a growing number of students, the University of East London needed a student administration reporting tool that was easy to deploy, cost-efficient to maintain and intuitive to use", said David Shelly, Corporate Systems Manager at UEL. "Having examined solutions from Oracle and Microsoft, the University of East London found Jaspersoft's iReport simple to deploy, productive and intuitive and so the obvious reporting tool choice."

Jim Bell, CMO at Jaspersoft, said, "The rapid results we've seen in the education sector are phenomenal. The last five years of technology advancement have allowed Jaspersoft to build software capable of handling massive pools of data and complex organizational processes. Business intelligence is driving a revolution in accountability and organizational success, and in many cases, schools and universities are choosing Jaspersoft BI because of its ease of use and affordability. Cost is a big issue. They cannot afford the high price tag and growing maintenance costs of traditional players."

Other Jaspersoft customers include higher education institutions such as The Johns Hopkins University, Vanderbilt University, and Eastern Washington University in the United States, Cranfield University in the United Kingdom, Institut Catholique de Paris in France, and the University of Valencia in Spain; school districts such as Eugene School district in Oregon and Nevada State High School district; and software companies such as Education Service Center (ESC), Quintessential School Systems and Schools OPEN.

About Jaspersoft

Jaspersoft provides the most flexible, cost effective and widely deployed Business Intelligence suite in the world, enabling better decision-making through highly interactive web-based reports, dashboards and analysis. Leveraging a commercial open source business model, Jaspersoft provides end-to-end BI capabilities at a fraction of the cost of other vendors. The BI suite includes pixel-perfect enterprise reporting, ad hoc query, dashboards, OLAP and in-memory analysis, and data integration. Jaspersoft is the only BI vendor that enables companies to adapt to the new, virtualized world by providing a complete spectrum of on-premise, multi-tenant SaaS and cloud-based deployment options for both embedded and standalone business intelligence. Unlike traditional BI vendors, Jaspersoft is built on a modern, lightweight, standards-based architecture and offers greater vendor independence thanks to its open source codebase. Unlike niche BI vendors, Jaspersoft represents a safe choice with tens of thousands of production deployments across a wide range of industries. Jaspersoft's open source business intelligence software has more than 14 million product downloads worldwide, 175,000 production deployments and over 14,000 commercial customers in 100 countries. Its BI suite is advanced regularly by a development community of more than 225,000 registered members. For more information visit: http://www.jaspersoft.com and http://www.jasperforge.org.