Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Open Source BI

Open Source Business Intelligence is hot. This month the SDForum Open Source SIG hosted a talk from JasperSoft about their open source reporting software. Tonight the Business Intelligence SIG heard from Sandeep Giri about their OpenI initiative to provide an Open Source BI application.

Currently OpenI is a BI application built on Open Source components that provides visualization of data from an OLAP source such as SQL Server or Mondrian. Sandeep has plans to expand OpenI to become a fully fledged BI platform.

I had asked Sandeep to talk about why they are making their application Open Source. Sandeep explained that his company, Loyalty Matrix, provides Software as a Service (SaaS). [This means that they can use most Open Source software to provide their service.] While there are several Open Source components with a BI flavor, there was no ready to run Open Source BI application or platform.

Loyalty Matrix has had to develop their own platform using Open Source software. By giving their application back to the Open Source community they get the implementation help, support and feedback of a large user group to complement their tiny development team.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have to admit that I'm rather impressed with openI as a querying and reporting tool.

I have spent a while looking at Palo either www.palo.net or (www.opensourceolap.com) which is a open source olap server. Actually it's a 64 bit MOLAP server and allows values to written back to be memory. Due to it being ram based it's ideal for Business intelligence, planning and budgeting and forecasting
An easy to use excel addin is provided and reporting is very simple.
In addition many APIs are provided should you wish to perform something more complex.
If your a BI developer or end user it's definately worth a look

1:27 AM

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