Data-Driven Decision Making
The Argument for Open
A computer science prof conducts his own study of proprietary versus open source BI-- and stands by his 'open' results. by
Just last year, business intelligence consultant David Wells, former director of education at The Data Warehousing Institute, remarked in Campus Technology that enterprise-level open source BI (OS BI) was not quite ready for prime time (see "Open for Business," CT February 2007). Still, he urged us not to wait five years or implement a proprietary system in the meantime: OS BI would be ready in a year or two, he predicted.
He was right.
Recent advancements in OS BI tool integration from companies such as Pentaho, Talend, and Jaspersoft-- coupled with the confusing and sometimes disruptive merging of proprietary BI vendors and product shuffling-- have produced disarray in product stability (not to mention licensing issues), thus moving OS BI tools to the top of the list for many users wanting to implement a BI solution. In fact, technology publications and organizations like CT and TDWI have in the past five years covered a growing number of OS BI options. It's now time to launch that BI initiative you've been contemplating-- and launch it with open source.
There are several categories of OS BI solutions: complete suites with commercial support and partnered consulting; individual modules or services developed specifically to work with other BI-related modules; frameworks and APIs intended for in-house programmers to use as a starting point; and even office suites-- for example, OpenOffice, with built-in database connectivity and a report extension, Sun Report Builder. In addition, there are many open source report tools such as (but not limited to) Pentaho Reporting, JasperReports, DataVision, OpenRPT, and Eclipse BIRT. No matter what your experience level or budget, there's an open source solution that can work for your organization.
I thoroughly investigated each of three OS BI toolsets by installing the OS BI tools myself, by interviewing technologists at academic institutions who had implemented these OS BI solutions, and by discussing the products with their developers/vendors. The three OS BI products I installed-- in addition to the OpenOffice solution that I was already running on my personal desktop-- were Pentaho BI Suite, Jaspersoft BI Suite, and Talend Open Studio. None of the installations took longer than 15 minutes, at which time I had real products accessing real databases-- not just simulated demos. For Jaspersoft, I caved in and downloaded the 30-day trial rather than downloading the four individual modules of the community suite, just to save a few minutes of downloading and setup time. But otherwise, the products I installed were free and open source with no subscription required, yet were enterprise-level applications.
I interviewed technologists at four institutions. Each organization I interviewed had evaluated a number of products, ranging from only a couple to seven or eight, including both open source and proprietary options.
Which Product?
With all this talk about standalone BI tools and packages, what about your enterprise resource planning (ERP) package and its BI modules? Maybe you can relate to the unnamed higher ed institution that purchased proprietary BI tool components along with its other ERP apps eight years ago. Additional time, money, and effort was spent to secure proprietary training, and then technologists worked for three years to get the online analytical processing (OLAP) module into production-- before they abandoned the entire BI project altogether. Yes, the project was eventually re-initiated: The proprietary OLAP and enterprise data warehouse (EDW) are now being implemented and the project is becoming operational this time. Not completed; just operational.