The Open Source Era
Research indicates open source is gaining momentum, and there are significant amounts of money coming from the investment community into open source vendors.
A study by Ventana Research [1] reveals midsize and
large companies are increasingly evaluating and deploying open source
business intelligence (BI) software.
Many have had positive experiences with the software and intend to
expand their use of it. Although open source BI software is not as
mature and feature-rich as equivalent software from commercial BI
vendors, organisations find it acceptably functional for their intended
uses.
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BI paradox
However,
during a recent BI conference I attended, some well-known IT and BI
specialists were asked what they think of up-and-coming open source BI
tools. Unfortunately, the event was sponsored by a non-open source BI
vendor, so the replies were rather subdued, with a few main points
being raised, among them:
1) If you want 'proper' support you need a 'proper' vendor.
2) Open source BI tools are not yet mature enough to really compete.
I
don't want to make the 'paradigm' argument here, but what I wanted was
to find out for myself, if one can get past the initial distrust of
software that is being maintained by a 'community' of 'contributors',
whether some of the BI offerings that are available in open source
support or disprove the above notions aired by a panel of BI experts.
I
decided to stick to data integration tools, even though there are
numerous open source projects that also cover reporting, OLAP,
dashboarding, meta data, data mining and other BI areas. I decided this
for no other reason than it is, in my opinion, the most technical part
of the 'backend' of any data warehouse or BI implementation.
Community support
I
visited the community pages of some open source BI vendors, downloaded
the data integration (DI) tool, and started experimenting. I soon
discovered their 'forums', where experts were at hand to give advice
and point one to the necessary online resources. I also registered on
the community 'issue and enhancement' request system, and could not
only log new enhancement requests here, but also view all the current
work that was in progress, complete with specifications, test
scenarios, etc.
As a technical person, I could not help but
wonder why commercial BI vendors can't be this open with what they are
busy with. I have also never experienced a commercial vendor with as
lively and helpful online forums and support as I experienced here. I
was pleasantly surprised!
In my techie heart, I felt this
support was more 'proper' and real than most I have experienced from
commercial vendors, but of course lacked the formality that large
organisations feel comfortable with.
Having said that, I quickly
learned the most popular of these open source BI tools do in fact also
have formal support 'subscriptions' of various levels, as well as
commercial versions of their software that boast a few extra features
for the 'enterprise-level' user.
