Open Source BI: Is it ready for prime time? (Intro)

Business Intelligence (BI) is the use of an organization's disparate data to provide meaningful information and analysis to employees, customers, regulators, and partners for more effective decision making. Business intelligence solutions gather information together, organize it, measure it, give people access to it, and share information changes.

The use and importance of business intelligence software tools is demonstrated by the size of the BI software market. The US Business Intelligence market is currently about $6 billion with an annual growth rate of approximately 12.5%.

Several commercial software vendors occupy the BI marketplace. The market leaders, in terms of market share, include IBM Cognos, SAP Business Objects, Oracle Hyperion, MicroStrategy and SAS among several smaller firms.

Each of these firms offers a proprietary software solution to the business intelligence needs of organizations. While the software implementations are unique to each vendor, the concepts and functions accomplished by each are common to all. These common functions are also addressed by an open, community-based approach called Open Source Projects. Open Source Projects rely on the free, technical contributions and development of participating individuals and companies around the world. Pentaho, JasperSoft and Talend, to a more limited degree, are examples of commercialized Open Source Projects. The resulting products developed are freely distributed to any entity. As the capabilities of Open Source BI projects continue to increase, the value of commercial, proprietary solutions is challenged. The commercial BI software vendors, therefore, protect their products by questioning the viability and readiness of Open Source BI software for use in commercial applications.

Because of the relatively recent advent of commercial, Open Source software and the competing interests of proprietary software companies, much uncertainty and misinformation exists in the software marketplace regarding the viability and usefulness of commercial open source software applications.

In subsequent posts, I plan to examine the issues and considerations regarding Open Source BI and to ultimately answer the questions: Is Open Source BI software ready for business?