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OSBI: the battle of the Sexes

Writing by Jorgen on Wednesday, 15 of September , 2010 at 2:35 pm

The renewed interest in open source Business Intelligence (Pentaho, Jaspersoft) could be considered as a clear counter reaction against the market domination due to (BI) vendor consolidation. Gartner in their 2010 Magic Quadrant BI paper come up with another explanation. They mention that “economic conditions are driving interest in low-cost alternatives”. As a result “organizations showed an increased willingness to consider open source for their enterprise BI platform deployments”. By the way, a lot of people think that Open Source also means for free. This is a misconception. But on the whole it does offer a lower TCO.

Jaspersoft and Pentaho seem to be the two most likely open source BI vendors to be considered by organizations for this as their solutions seem to match those of the commercial BI vendors. Jaspersoft Enterprise Edition includes ETL capabilities from Talend but seem to be most popular for its reporting capabilities. Those capabilities include new web 2.0 functionality, drag and drop, a new meta data layer and Microsoft Windows and Office integration. Pentaho offers a more broader BI suite to its clients and has shown some cool innovations (BI for the Iphone) and strategic partnerships (Ingres, Inforbright).

So there seems to be as great potential in market growth for Open Source BI. At the one hand the industry analysts give a boost referring to the lower cost of ownership for Open Source BI and at the other hand the BI software market seems to be recovering showing a 10% growth in the Netherlands:(http://www.computable.nl/artikel/ict_topics/business_intelligence/3512364/1277145/bimarkt-is-terug-op-niveau-van-voor-de-crisis.html)

But still the battle remains and organizations feel that they have to choose between open or closed source BI, while in actuality both can coexist in any technical BI architecture.

So what is holding organizations back in the final adoption of Open Source BI? In my experience it is just fear of the unknown. What is OSBI? What can I do with it? Maybe it is time to get to know each other a bit better and start dating?

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Category: BI Thoughts, BI Tools, BI vendor consolidation, Business Intelligence consulting, Business Intelligence datawarehousing, Business Intelligence software, Business Intelligence solution, Business Intelligence strategy, Business Intelligence system, Business Intelligence tools

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Author

Jorgen Heizenberg is Principal Technology Officer for the Business Intelligence domain at Capgemini Netherlands. The views expressed in this blog accurately reflect his personal views about any or all of the subjects and is not part of the official Capgemini company view. PLEASE REACT TO HIS OPINIONS AND BECOME AN ONLINE BI GURU. See also: http://www.beyenetwork.nl/blogs/heizenberg/