business intelligence software
By David Nordmark
Open Source BI (business intelligence software) is not ready for production use today. Open Source BI is in its infancy, and will not be ready for a few years. Companies should not look to open source today for realistic BI functionality that can compete with the pure-play products. Open source BI is a work in progress."
Keith Gile, Forrester
Open Source is software in which the source code is made publicly available. With the relative success of such projects as Linux and MYSQL, many companies are taking harder looks at this kind of software as possible solutions for their IT needs. In the business intelligence software space, open source software is still relatively new. However, given time, there is no reason not to expect it to be just as widely used and accepted as Linux or MYSQL (in the operating system and database spaces, respectively) are today. Although there are something like over a 1000 Open Source Business Intelligence projects underway at the moment, the three main ones are BIRT, JasperSoft, and Pentaho. The intention of this article is to give a brief overview of these three software firms.
BIRT stands for Business Intelligence and Reporting Technology. It is part of the Eclipse Foundation, whose goal is to create an open source software framework written in Java. The BIRT project is overseen by Actuate, a traditional closed source business software maker. There are two version of BIRT, Eclipse BIRT and Actuate BIRT. Eclipse BIRT is available for free, whereas Actuate BIRT needs to be purchased. Actuate intends to make money on its commercial version by selling subscription services and support.
As business intelligence software, BIRT is currently limited in its reporting features. It is only capable of very basic report creation, and any kind of analysis capabilities seems to be far off. Nonetheless, the current feature set is considered good enough by many. Eclipse BIRT is free and easily downloadable, whereas Actuate BIRT features one click install and offers support services. On the downside, BIRT is considered to be very developer-centric and requires complex scripting for many functions. It is currently only available in Java.
JasperSoft was originally known as Panscopic, which sold a traditional closed source business intelligence solution. When Panscopic embraced open source development, the company and its products were re-branded under the "Jasper" name. JasperIntelligence is their open source product line based on Java. It is made up of the following products:
- JasperReports - A reporting tool
- JasperDesigner - A GUI based report writer for JasperReports
- iReport - Another GUI based report writer for JasperReports
- JasperServer - Server based product for JasperReports, providing scheduling, security and user administration
- JasperAnalytics - OLAP Server
- JasperETL - ETL Server
JasperSoft intends to make money on its open source products by offering premium support services, as well as a commercial version of JasperIntelligence. This commercial version also contains some functionality not found in the open sourced version.
Pentaho is a relatively new firm in the open source business intelligence market. It was founded in 2005 by five experienced BI software veterans who had worked at companies such as Cognos, Hyperion, Oracle, Business Objects and SAS. The name of the company is supposedly derived from the five founders desire to retire to Lake Tahoe.
Pentaho is intended to be a complete business intelligence solution based on Java. It is capable of performing OLAP, reporting, dashboards, data mining, and data integration. Like JasperSoft and Actuate, Pentaho intends to make money by selling premium support services, as well as a commercial version to enterprise customers. The Pentaho BI project was awarded as project of the month by SourceForge on October 2006.
David Nordmark worked in the business intelligence software industry for nearly 7 years. He created and runs the website http://www.BusinessSoftwareResource.com/
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