Open-Source Platform Aims At Business Intelligence

The open-source community is looking to get more intelligent about business intelligence.

Two companies on Tuesday unwrapped the first open-source suite for the development of business intelligence projects that will be able to go up against the latest technologies and strategies delivered by Microsoft and IBM.

Spearheaded by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica and ObjectWeb, SpagoBI essentially is a unified collection of analytical tools, including those for static reporting and analysis, data-mining techniques, a structured control suite and a number of dashboard components.

The new business-intelligence platform can be integrated with the existing ObjectWeb stack of open-source middleware projects, including the eXo Platform, which is a Java enterprise-class portal, and JOnAS, an application server that complies with the 1.4 version of Java Enterprise Edition 2.0 (J2EE).

Because it is based purely on open-source code, company executives from Engineering Ingegneria and ObjectWeb believe their platform offers developers and VARs a cheaper, faster way to deliver business-intelligence solutions compared to the competitive offerings of Microsoft and IBM.

"A company like Microsoft focuses on its own products like SQL Server, Office and SharePoint, and expects you to buy its entire suite in order to use its business-intelligence components. But our approach allows you to mix and match components that extend the range of BI-based solutions," says Gabriele Ruffatti, architecture and consulting director of Engineering's Research and Innovation Division.

With the flexibility to mix and match a wider range of components, users and VARs can collect, analyze and distribute more relevant data, officials from the companies contend. The encouraging trend for those pursuing open-source-based business-intelligence strategies is that more proprietary vendors are willing to lay bare their application programming interfaces (APIs), allowing open-source applications to work with them.

"As more and more commercial vendors provide APIs that let things like CRM or ERP applications communicate with other, [SpagoBI] will be able to integrate with more systems, giving people a much broader and federated view of all their data no matter where it is," says Jean-Pierre Laisne, ObjectWeb chairman and Linux and open source strategy manager for Bull.

Microsoft officials, of course, do not believe their business-intelligence products and strategies are closed and more expensive. They believe that by supporting XML and SQL Server Analysis Services, Microsoft's business-intelligence-related products, most notably the next version of Excel, can tap into any server-based application, including Oracle's database and SAP's software.

"We are putting end user [business intelligence] capabilities directly into Office because that is where customers want them, and that will allow BI to reach what we see as huge potential in companies," says Chris Caren, general manager of office business applications at Microsoft.

Other proprietary competitors do not see open-source competitors as serious threats, particularly at the high end of the business-intelligence market. Some believe many open-source competitors do not have the necessary one-stop offerings that large enterprises are looking for.

"The open-source BI movement is an interesting sideshow, but is the enterprise the natural market for this stuff? The Global 3,500 type of companies have the most complex data sets and need complex infrastructures that make a single view of the truth hard to do," says Neal Hill, vice president of corporate development at Congas.

Hill and some other observers think open-source vendors can contribute useful pieces of code that could complement a user's existing proprietary software, but it could be years before any emerge as serious competitors at the high end.