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July 9, 2008
Open Source Business Intelligence- A fitment with Caution
You can reduce your BI costs, by gradually testing and adopting Open-Source BI in a select set of areas. There is a difference within open source and commercial open source. In this page we are talking about commercial open source, which is not free of cost but of minimal cost, with adequate support and services infrastructure. Pentaho and Jasper are examples of commercial open source.
I recommend the evaluation and use of Open Source BI for non-core BI areas like presentation & visualization tools, business modeling tools, web-based query and reporting tools (not enterprise reporting tools) etc. In other words, the open source BI is not recommended to be used for core production engines of your BI environment.
While big players like pentaho and Jasper have bagged some large contracts for core BI platforms, they will need many years of satisfactory field reports to generate wide-spread confidence.
The 'non-core' approach will give you a great cost advantage, as it save cost for large scale viewer licenses. It is also a way to test the robustness and support capability of these tools and Vendors. Some of the open source end-user tools are fairly competitive in terms of features. When you acquire a commercial open source, one can be more diligent on service and support factors.
In case you need some more detail on the same subject, you may refer Open Source BI- A cautious fit in your BI plans in my portal bipminstitute.com
Posted by Rajan Gupta at July 9, 2008 11:15 AM
