Atif A.
Evangelist - Corporate Competitiveness through Knowledge Management & Analytics
Open Source Business Intelligence
Do you think Open Source BI will gain its market share in years to come or will it decline? Especially after the acquisition of Hyperion, Cognos and now BusinessObjects by Oracle, IBM and SAP respectively, do you think Open Source BI has a special offering to its customers which can sustain the rigorous marketing campaigns by the big three? Apparently, companies are more willing to go for closed source commerical BI systems, indicating that open source is not the main criteria for a BI product procurement. Whats your opinion?
Good Answers (6)
David H.
Executive Vice President, Technology Market Solutions at Harte-Hanks
Best Answers in: Enterprise Software (2), Business Analytics (1)
I believe the Open Source movement in general, and particularly now within the BI market, is a major force to be reckoned by established software players. Like the SaaS or "On-Demand" approaches, Open Source presents end-user organizations with some new options for considering how to look at the TCO (total cost of ownership) of technology. For more than two decades now, BI has grown and become a capability that is in high demand, yet as my research has shown, companies are struggling to find ways to expand its use within their enterprises, and to adapt its use across multiple areas of the business. I am about to launch a major benchmark study aimed at quantifying the TCO of BI. The study will compare the experiences and performance of respondents who have adopted Open Source vs. the respondents who have acquired BI through traditional licensing. I plan to explore the concept of a "community", as found within the Open Source world, vs. the power of the large (and growing ever larger) vendor offerings of the leading established BI players. I'll also have the opportunity to compare and contrast the respondents along the "On-Demand" continuum as well. Look for more info within the next few days, and feel free to Link In with me if you'd like to be made aware of the survey link once it is live (on or around 12/26/07). Below is a link to the study preview document. --Dave
Links:
Phillip R.
Senior Consultant at Open Software Integrators, LLC
Best Answers in: Using LinkedIn (5), Web Development (4), Staffing and Recruiting (3), Career Management (2), Professional Organizations (2), Enterprise Software (2), Software Development (2), Mentoring (1), Contracts (1), Internet Marketing (1), Change Management (1), Planning (1), Market Research and Definition (1), Starting Up (1), Blogging (1), E-Commerce (1), Computers and Software (1), Computer Networking (1)
I don't see any particular reason why BI should be any different from any other genre. In the long run, my belief is that open-source is the future of pretty much all software. Some sectors may lag behind others, but I expect to see OSS make inroads in the BI space, and for the same reasons that OSS is making inroads in so many other spaces. Particularly I would expect the OSS software to make gains go penetrating the SMB market at companies that aren't currently using BI at all. The challenge there may be helping the companies understand the value of BI tools in general.
Sergio L.
Senior Consultant at Lodestone Management Consultants
Best Answers in: Organizational Development (4), Business Analytics (2), Customer Service (1), Career Management (1)
Open Source BI will gain its market share in years to come. I see Open Source BI going side by side with Open Source ERP packages. Selling BI to SMBs is hard but giving it way as an ERP feature will be easier for all. In a couple of years all major ERP packages will ship with built in BI features. Major BI players will market BI as an ERP feature and BI as a stand alone software package will be targeted to specific industries like banking because banks rely on proprietary transactional systems. In a couple of years we will have BI for all as BI will be available as webapps, like Zoho's DB & Reports or Google Analytics.
Links:
Rajasekar N.
SAP Certified Business Objects Consultant / SAP Business Objects SME
Best Answers in: Using LinkedIn (3)
Open source BI Market will surely gain more market share .More over if you take Pentaho they are not only in Just reporting they have other tools like OLAP (Mondrian), reporting (JFreeReport), ETL (Kettle) and in data mining tools.
There are some features which is not available in other commmercial BI Tools but it is there in Opensource BI.This helps them to have a broader market insight in BI Space in near future.
Stowe S.
Author/Writer, Principal PHP/MySQL developer on LAMP stack at Action Navigation LLC
Best Answers in: Web Development (2), Education and Schools (1), Change Management (1), Enterprise Software (1)
As with any Open Source project/software, reputation is what really counts. You have open source software that is better than some of its proprietary competitors and some not.
Open Source is here to stay and will become more widely used, not only in SMBs, but enterprise-wide. But reputation and extensibility will be the key criteria for evaluation.
Pentaho is a great example and viable alternative to commercial BI options.
The general discussion here seems to equate open source with free -- it is not. There is a very viable and growing industry based on commercial open source software, and they are finding a lot of traction in the SMB market. Red Hat, MySQL and Pentaho are three common examples, but there are many more. While you might be able to download the source code, that does not mean it is viable to run a business on it without paying money to someone for something. Maybe it is a commercial-use license, maybe it is support, maybe it is documentation, maybe it is implementation assistance. In almost all cases, though, it is cheaper than the proprietary offerings, and in the BI space, the big guys just got bigger, so expect the prices to go up (Business Objects recently annouced their price increase).
More Answers (3)
Lisa M D.
IT Manager, Senior IT Professional
Best Answers in: Staffing and Recruiting (2), Professional Networking (1), Computers and Software (1)
I have to say I don't think OS solutions will be able to gain a real foot hold in any market that needs real BI tools solutions NOW. I've been in enough organizations that have implemented BI tools--BO, Cognos, and Microsoft--to know of the pains of implementing even these tools, and they are the industry standards by which even OS solutions would be modeled against. Implementation is an unbelievably complex time and resource hog, not to mention any internal or external SLA needed to maintain the system post implementation. The complexity that is inherent to BI in the first place is the reason why OSS gaining any real market share is not likely to happen.
In general, the current positioning of open source applications (BI and otherwise) is at least good enough and often better functionality compared with the commercial options, at a fraction of the cost. The survey results linked below from the Open Solutions Alliance supports this view. The issues that make open source attractive to developers and software vendors, like access to the source, are not as important to organizations that use open source applications as is.
For BI in particular, Open Source BI has a better story for embedded BI in applications than the commercial vendors, and the Open Source BI vendors like JasperSoft (my firm, SAP is an investor), Pentaho and others are adding enterprise functionality like metadata layers, ad hoc reporting tools etc. Open Source BI is already competing with and replacing commercial products. The recent BI acquisitions will be distractions for the BI vendors and their customer bases. The challenge for the Open Source BI vendors will be to keep cost structures low while continuing to deliver more for customers and their open source communities.
The SMB market usually does not have the technology resources of larger organizations. They need simple to set up and use tools at a low cost, and for BI, out of the box solutions for their applications and business needs. Partnerships are needed here, like the JasperSoft/Noetix solution for the Oracle E-Business Suite (link below).
Links:
Crystal N W.
Intelligence Analyst at NSW Government
Best Answers in: Business Analytics (2), Facilities Management (1), Occupational Training (1), Risk Management (1), Planning (1), Career Management (1), Enterprise Software (1), Computers and Software (1)
I believe that users of Business Intelligence do so in order to gain competitive advantage. As such, data security is a big issue. While open source applications are sometimes more stable than commercial offerings, the fact that source code is available and could therefore be exploited to make their data vulnerable has got to be a consideration.
Only when this is overcome, and open source data safety can be assured, will open source BI be viable as an alternative, imho.
