BIRT vs Jasper: Enterprise Reporting Migration for a High-Volume Business Environment

About Client

The client is one of Asia’s largest e-commerce marketplaces, supporting large-scale enterprises through digital e-auction and e-procurement services for critical resources such as steel, oil, and coal. With operations spanning multiple regions and complex transactional workflows, reporting accuracy and performance were central to business operations.
Client Revenue: USD 185 Million (FY’21)

As reporting demands grew across procurement, auctions, and financial analytics, the client began reassessing its reporting stack. A detailed BIRT vs Jasper evaluation revealed that while BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) had served well in earlier stages, it was increasingly constrained in areas such as performance, scalability, and report deployment flexibility.

The client required a reporting platform that could support enterprise-grade reporting with minimal dependency on the core application, while also enabling faster report creation and easier access for business users. This comparison of BIRT vs Jasper highlighted Jasper’s strengths in interactive reporting, dashboarding, and server-side optimizations—making it a suitable replacement for the existing BIRT setup.

Challenge

The client decided to migrate from BIRT to TIBCO Jasper Server to better support evolving business requirements. The primary objectives behind this move—identified during the BIRT vs Jasper assessment—included:

  • Reducing processing load on the core application server by offloading reporting workloads
  • Enabling pixel-perfect, user-friendly reports with drag-and-drop design capabilities
  • Allowing seamless deployment of reports and dashboards without workflow dependencies, reducing turnaround time and operational cost

However, this migration introduced several complexities. The existing BIRT ecosystem consisted of numerous standalone reports that needed consolidation, performance tuning, and redesign. In addition, the client anticipated future analytics evolution, including possible Jasper to Power BI integration for advanced visualization and self-service analytics—making architectural decisions critical during the migration phase.

Our Solution

We approached the migration with a structured, future-ready implementation strategy.

  • Conducted a comprehensive assessment of existing BIRT report modules and underlying queries to understand dependencies, complexity, and usage patterns.
  • Redesigned reports in Jasper based on stakeholder requirements, ensuring functional parity with BIRT while improving performance and usability.
  • Consolidated more than 80 categorized reports into a centralized Jasper repository, simplifying access and reducing report duplication.
  • Enabled secure, parameter-driven report access, allowing users to retrieve relevant reports with appropriate inputs and minimal manual intervention.
  • Optimized legacy BIRT queries to improve execution speed for both dashboards and detailed reports in the Jasper environment.
  • Implemented backend enhancements, including ad-hoc caching, to support faster execution of self-driven and ad-hoc reporting workloads.
  • Addressed security and governance requirements through Single Sign-On (SSO) implementation.
  • Enabled secure, URL-based authentication from the core application to Jasper Server, ensuring controlled access for authorized users.
  • Restricted export functionality to approved formats (XLS, XLSX, PDF) to meet compliance and operational guidelines.
  • Designed the solution architecture with future Jasper to Power BI transitions in mind, ensuring clean data structures and reusable datasets for downstream BI platforms.

TIBCO Jaspersoft:
A popular open-source business intelligence platform that offers a variety of features and capabilities including interactive reports, dashboards, and charts, and embedded BI analytics.

Outcome
Migrated BIRT reports to Jasper with Single Sign On (SSON) implementation to allow access to authorised users in

6 Months
Consolidated 80+ reports
Over
30 drill-down reports (parent-child reports) developed

By modernizing its reporting architecture and resolving long-standing limitations identified during the BIRT vs Jasper comparison, the client established a scalable foundation for future analytics. The solution also positioned the organization to adopt Jasper to Power BI integrations in subsequent phases—supporting advanced visualization, self-service BI, and executive-level analytics without rework.

This engagement demonstrates how thoughtful reporting modernization, grounded in real-world BIRT vs Jasper considerations, can deliver immediate operational value while remaining adaptable to future Jasper to Power BI analytics strategies.

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