Business intelligence software (BI) has become ubiquitous in the enterprise over the last two decades, but while deployment rates may as high as ever, there exists a large gap between ownership and actual usage that is costing CIOs in unnecessary license fees. The average knowledge worker no longer spends most of their day trying to navigate the complexity of their organization’s SAP installation, instead opting to use the best tool for the job.

Jaspersoft has come up with an answer to this expensive challenge with an embedded solution that gives users access to the dashboarding and report functionality they depend on to be productive within their platform of choice, be it a cloud service or a Hadoop distribution. The company’s unique approach has sent a shock wave through the BI market, catching the attention of CIOs as well as incumbent rivals such as TIBCO.

Instead of investing time and resources in developing an alternative that may or may not meet the new industry standard, the vendor has opted to buy out Jaspersoft in a $185 million deal that positions it at the forefront of the modern business intelligence market. TIBCO said that the firm’s software will be integrated with its Spotfire in-memory analytics software to deliver Big Data capabilities, namely integration with NoSQL databases and Hadoop, that the solution did not previously support.

While TIBCO is working to help business users be more productive, an emerging startup called SoftWatch is trying to help them be more efficient in the way they consume productivity tools.  The company develops a cloud-based analytics tool that determines how frequently workers access a given Microsoft Office application and for what reason and identifies opportunities to drive savings in licensing costs. It recently released a study that reveals the average enterprise employee spends only 48 minutes of their workday using Office applications.

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