Red Hat is not disclosing its exact investment in JasperSoft, which offers a suite of open-source business intelligence products, including JasperServer, JasperAnalysis and JasperReports. JasperSoft also has a significant number of OEM (original equipment manufacturer) partners that license its software, and it claims to be the most widely deployed business-intelligence software in the world, with more than 7 million product downloads.

In a Red Hat said it invested in JasperSoft to "support a thriving open-source ecosystem" through its Red Hat Exchange (RHX) program, which provides an online marketplace for open-source software. JasperSoft is a RHX partner.

Red Hat already has the leading Linux OS with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and has Java-based software infrastructure through its JBoss product. But it is always looking to support open-source enterprise applications to run on top of its Linux distribution.

"Our goal is to present open source solution sets that reach well beyond the OS and solve real problems for customers," the company said in the blog post, which is attributed to the RHX team at Red Hat. "Our investment and partnership in JasperSoft will help us achieve that goal by expanding the opportunities for open source software and leveraging the value inherent in all open source solutions."

Red Hat may have another motive for investing in JasperSoft: a possible acquisition down the road. The company has only ever invested in one other RHX partner, MySQL, which some observers thought would be a good acquisition target for Red Hat at one point. Red Hat competitor Sun Microsystems eventually purchased MySQL.