Open Source Business Intelligence (BI) Overview

Why most companies have historically missed out on BI?
Business Intelligence (BI) refers to technologies, applications, practices and skills that are used to help a business understand its commercial operations with the view to improve business performance and profitable revenues and reduce business risks.

Many BI implementations are built on data warehouses and provided extensive query and reporting capabilities. These were supplemented with slice-and-dice analysis using online analytical (OLAP) technologies plus statistical modelling software for advanced data analytics. Historically, only large companies could afford the six figure investment in upfront licensing and maintenance fees required by the proprietary BI vendors, the majority of companies could not afford to implement a BI solution.

Why is BI critical in today’s recession?
BI and advanced data analytics is now a critical component of business operations if it is to survive and grow in this recession. Customers are changing their buying habits in response to the recession at even greater rates than before. This means that business managers need to be able to detect patterns that indicate changes in customer behaviour and response with the required marketing initiatives to retain and grow customer revenues.

Open Source BI – a disruptive technology.
Over the last five years a revolution in BI technology has occurred with the rise of Open Source BI vendors, such as Pentaho and Jaspersoft, which has enabled affordable BI implementations at low subscription prices. For every component of a traditional proprietary BI solution there are several commercial open source equivalents.

Open Source BI solutions typically contain the following:

• Data Warehouse – The data warehouse is an important key component of any BI solution and was traditionally very expensive to license and support. Infobright Open Source Data Warehouse (which leverages MySQL) leads the field in affordable high performance analytical open source data warehouse.
  
• The Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) – ETL is a critical and traditionally expensive process required to extract data from operational systems, perform data cleaning and load the data into the data warehouse. Companies like Talend with their open source Data Integration Suite offers all the capabilities of the expensive proprietary alternatives for a low subscription cost.
  
• BI Reporting and Analysis – Two open source BI vendors (Pentaho and Jaspersoft) provide competitive BI offerings that include BI reporting, BI OLAP slice-and-dice analysis tools, Data mining, and BI dashboard at affordable subscription costs. Pentaho BI offering also includes its own open source ETL offering.
  
• Advanced Analytics and Data mining – There are many open source offerings in this area including DataMiner, R, Pentaho Data Mining and offers an affordable alternative to proprietary offerings.
  

Azinta BI Solutions
The Azinta Recession Advantage Accelerator package is a flexible set of quick-start BI solutions that enables companies to gain a competitive advantage by identifying new business opportunities, growing sales and profits. For further information contact: sales@azinta.com