Open source business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft today announced its BI platform-as-a-service. The service will first be available on RedHat OpenShift and will enable developers take take advantage of Jaspersoft’s software for building customer BI applications. OpenShift can run both on-premise or in the public cloud. Jaspersoft VP of Technology Karl Van den Bergh says the solution will be coming other PaaS providers as well.

This isn’t just a hosted BI app – it’s a framework for building BI apps. “Jaspersoft has had a hard time cracking the direct enterprise market going up against SAP (BOBJ), Oracle (Hyperion) and IBM (cognos) over the last few years, says Wikibon analyst Jeffrey Kelly. “They have had more success targeting app developers looking to embed analytics in the apps they are building.”

In recent months Jaspersoft has been working to provide integration with Apache Hadoop and NoSQL databases to help BI professionals better take advantage of big data. That could be the killer app for the JasperSoft PaaS: making it easy for cloud developers to take advantage of big data.

This move also points to what PaaS can be once more technologies start to be integrated into the development stacks. We should start to see PaaSes with more than just programming languages, libraries and databases. For example, we could start to see enterprise PaaS begin to merge data integration service (Talend and SnapLogic, for example). IBM is already on the way with its middleware centric SmartCloud.