Better together: Tibco snaps up fellow biz-intelligence player Jaspersoft for $185M

Publicly traded business-intelligence (BI) and data-integration provider Tibco Software said today it’s bought Jaspersoft, a venture-backed company with BI software available by the hour.

The deal cost Tibco $185 million, according to a statement. As a result, Tibco will be able to expand its portfolio.

Tibco reported $1.06 billion in revenue in 2013.

Trusted BI software makers and startups play hard these days as they go after deep-pocketed enterprises. Investors have recently thrown money behind up-and-comers like Bime Analytics, Birst, DataRPM, and ThoughtSpot.

In buying Jaspersoft, Tibco is electing to bolster its portfolio with more features — and buy up a company with some similar capabilities.

Tibco already has a cloud-based BI service, called Spotfire Cloud, and now Jaspersoft’s comparable tool amounts to “a perfect complement,” Tibco chief technology officer Matt Quinn said in the statement. Indeed, analyst firm Gartner has highlighted fast customer adoption soon after Jaspersoft’s utility BI tool became available on the Amazon Web Services marketplace.

Tibco’s Spotfire Cloud software, by comparison, is a fully hosted service; unlike the Jaspersoft service, there’s no need to set up cloud infrastructure to run it.

Jaspersoft stands out for its support for NoSQL databases like MongoDB, Apache Cassandra, and Neo4j.

Meanwhile, Jaspersoft also brings Tibco an open-source play. The Jaspersoft Community could serve as an on-ramp for paying customers.

And naturally, Tibco gets plenty of customers, including British Telecom, Puma, Sierra Club, Sungard, Time Warner Cable, and the U.S. Marine Corps. Jaspersoft claims 2,000 commercial customers and more than 140,000 production deployments.

San Francisco-based Jaspersoft started in 2004. Jaspersoft had received $58 million by the time it announced an $11 million funding round in 2011. Investors include Quest Software, Red Hat, SAP Ventures, Doll Capital Management, Morgenthaler Ventures, Partech International, Scale Venture Partners, and Adams Street Partners.

This isn’t Tibco’s first time going it’s bought a company to improve its services. Last year, it moved to enhance its mobile business intelligence capabilities by buying Extended Results.

Disclosure: Philippe Cases, an investor and board member of Jaspersoft, is also an investor and board member of VentureBeat. See a list of all of VentureBeat’s investors.