Business Intelligence helps us understand the details about customers that are crucial to the success of any organization. Traditionally these offerings are very expensive due to licensing fees for the several components. Of late, some momentum has been seen around Open Source and maturity of projects suitable for BI. But we have only heard of the adoption of Open Source in the Infrastructure layer – OS, database, App Servers etc. Very little attention has been paid to the software required to build and deliver Business Intelligence. That is, until now.

Lets take a subset of some of the BI offerings, and see how Open Source solutions match up against them.

  1. Databases: PostGres (or Bizgres) and MySQL.
  2. ETL: Enhydra Octopus and Clover
  3. OLAP: Mondrian and GreenPlum
  4. Dashboards (Portal approach): JBoss Portal, JetSpeed, LifeRay and Gluecode (now owned by IBM.
  5. Reporting: Jasper Reports, BIRT

If this doesn’t sound promising, Pentaho is planning a Open Source BI distribution that brings all of the above together and some more. This sounds very exciting for myself and for my company, which has been providing Open Source solutions for almost 5 years.

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