Open Source BI Still Fighting For Its Share

Seth Grimes published today in Information Week, an article about Open Source BI called Open Source BI Still Fighting For Its Share (in the PDF file of the article the title is "Fine, but Not Fine-Tuned Yet").

He heard many executives of open source BI companies, mainly Steve Snyder of JasperReports and Richard Daley, CEO of Pentaho.

He said although the open source BI market is growing, the market remains dominated by the likes of Business Objects, Cognos, Microsoft, and Oracle.

BI suites typically cover core query, analysis, and reporting functions, and also provide data integration and dashboard visualization capabilities. Commercial open source BI vendors, notably Pentaho and JasperSoft, offer these components in free community editions with open source licenses, and also packaged with non-open source extensions in paid, supported, indemnified editions. The extensions include spreadsheet services for Microsoft Excel, Ajax interactive dashboards, and metadata abstraction layers that insulate business end users from the underlying database schema.

He also said that have two additional open source BI offerings are worth considering. The first, the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools project, is primarily of interest to Java developers. The second, the Palo OLAP Server from German firm Jedox, develops enterprise technologies for Excel applications, targeting enterprise planning, analysis, reporting, and consolidation apps.

One customer - Beyond Compliance, a provider of hosted compliance management software--uses Palo Excel-based reporting for analytical reports that include tables and graphs. Beyond Compliance harnesses the Palo OLAP Server on the back end and the non-open source Palo Worksheet Server for report distribution. "The nice thing about Palo is that we've taken report design away from developers and brought it to our client-services team, to end users," says Rick Clazie, Beyond Compliance's technology and infrastructure manager. The company doesn't measure the ROI of its open source choice in financial terms, trusting that faster reporting turnaround and extended capabilities increase client satisfaction.

He finished the article: Will others take this leap to open source BI? Gartner projects triple the adoption by 2012, implying much faster growth than the overall BI market. BI is making progress, particularly when commercially packaged to deliver usability and support lacking with free components. As people like Snyder and Clazie push these tools out to employees, that packaging, coupled with open source's lower costs, will be critical to open source BI's enterprise success.

Seth Grimes wrote a post with additional material in his blog in Intelligent Interprise, complementing his article, I would like to highlight:

OSBI's growing appeal to enterprise end users. End users need capable, robust, and usable software.

That core software components are free makes open source attractive both to end users and for systems integrators and independent software vendors that sell products and services built on OSBI components.

With open source, baseline costs are lowered, boosting margins, and [integrators and ISVs] have the ability to customize the code or develop extensions if they wish. Customers benefit and so does the greater user community. For instance, Yves de Montcheuil, marketing VP at open-source data-integration vendor Talend, boasts that half of his company’s 250 data-source/destination connectors were contributed by users.

In my opinion, Seth Grimes did a good explanation about how is the Open Source BI scenario.

Tomorrow on DM Radio: Four Mega-Trends in Enterprise Data Integration

Tomorrow, October 9th at 3PM ET, the DM Review,in its initiative called DM Radio, will provide a live web broadcast called Four Mega-Trends in Enterprise Data Integration, hosted by Eric Kavanagh with Jim Ericson.

According DM Review: "Size, speed, interoperability and economics – these four mega-trends drive the evolution of enterprise data integration, according to industry guru Philip Russom of TDWI. Size can refer to the raw amount of data a company must integrate; but it also refers to the number of information producers and consumers. Speed covers a range of issues, from the latency of data to the frequency of reports, to the cycle time for creating analytical applications. Interoperability deals with the way systems and data work with each other. And economics, well… we all know what that means, but companies can take penny-pinching too far.

Tune into this episode of DM Radio to hear several industry experts discuss these four mega-trends and how they might affect you and your organization. We’ll talk to Yves de Montchieul of Talend, Suresh Chandrasekaran of Denodo, and Sami Akbay of GoldenGate Software to hear what’s happening on the front lines of enterprise data integration.

Attendees will learn:
- Why bigger is not always better
- How speed can be leveraged for better reporting
- Methods for improving interoperability
- Tips for knowing where and when to save money"

In the DM Review website, you can register for this live Web broadcast.

You also can check out the DM Radio archives to hear previous programs with a variety of other issues.

The DM radio is an excellent initiative by DM Review to spread knowledge with expert professionals in interesting subjects.

TDWI's Technology Poster about Master Data Management

The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) published Technology Poster about Master Data Management, designed by Philip Russom, senior manager of TDWI Research. According TDWI: the Master Data Management poster sorts out the complex layers of the MDM stack, illustrating how people, practices, and software automation are coordinated in a mature MDM implementation.

This poster will help explain:
- The tools, technologies, and techniques that go into the MDM technology stack.
- How the tech stack adjusts to practices like operational MDM and analytic MDM.
- How the MDM technology stack is influenced by pre-existing systems, architectural approaches, growth over time, and build-versus-buy decisions.

This kind of poster is very interesting, because it can be used to explain how MDM works in two ways, first as an overview and after detailing each layer of the process.


Philip Russom tells what he imagined to create the poster:
"On a break during the TDWI World Conference in Chicago this May, I left the hotel and walked up the street to the Museum of Contemporary Art. As soon as I entered, I saw mobiles by the great American sculptor Alexander Calder. My head was spinning from the technical presentations I’d seen at the conference, and it struck me that Calder mobiles resemble the way we draw technology stacks and system architectures. Both are compartmentalized, yet the parts are connected and interactive. Both move and evolve slowly as the winds of change brush them.

Later, when I needed a metaphor for the many pieces that master data management connects and coordinates, I naturally thought of Calder’s elegant and organic mobiles.

As you look at the poster, try to imagine the pieces in motion like a Calder mobile, with the operational, analytic, and enterprise practices spinning, and the balance shifting from collaboration to implementation and back again.

My thanks to Deirdre Hoffman for translating my ideas into the graphic images of this poster."

You can request a free print copy (US and Canada Only) or download a PDF version, in the TDWI website (registration required).

The following companies are sponsors of this technology poster: Baseline Consulting, BizGui Inc, EasyAsk, Exeros, MicroStrategy, Syncsort, Talend.