By Boris Evelson
In my recent BI Belt Tightening For Tough Economic Times document I explored a few low-cost alternatives to traditional, mainstream, and typically relatively expensive Business Intelligence (BI) tools. While some of these alternatives indeed were a fraction of a cost of a characteristic large enterprise BI software license, there were even fewer truly zero cost options. But there were some. For example, you can:
Leverage and use no-cost bundled BI software already in-house. Small departments and workgroups may be able to leverage BI software that comes bundled at no additional cost with BI appliances, database management systems (DBMSes), and application licenses. You can consider using these few free licenses from Actuate, IBM Cognos, Information Builders, Jaspersoft, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, Panorama, Pentaho, and SAP Business Objects for additional functions such as testing, QA, and prototyping. While these few free licenses are just a drop in the bucket in a typical large enterprise BI license requirements, do look around and don’t waste money on BI products you may already have.
Use free Open Source BI components if you are a developer, since the source code is freely and easily available. Access to source code that makes the software easy to embed in other software solutions, so Open Source (OS) is also popular with independent software vendors (ISVs). However, OS BI as an enterprise grade BI solution, is not truly free. Even though individual reporting, OLAP, and even ETL components are available for free, most open source vendors sell add-on products that tie all components into a more fully functional BI application, such as specific dbms and ERP application connectors, GUI administration utilities and others
Now MicroStrategy is taking the concept of free BI one step further. Today MicroStrategy announced that it is making its Release 9 software available for up to 100 users/consumers of info (1 CPU, 2 developers, 2 power users, online support only) at no cost! Now that’s a whole different story. Now we are talking about not just individual components, but a complete BI solution. We are also not talking about a small use case for just testing groups or QA or prototyping. With 100 users you can roll a BI application out for free to a whole department in a large enterprise or to a small business. Is this the beginning of a trend? Between OS BI and MicroStrategy new direction, I can’t help but to ponder: is BI (and other enterprise applcations) going to go the way of printers or cell phones that are being given away almost at cost just to be able to hook and reel in the customers for supplies and service?
Boris Evelson's blog can also be found at http://blogs.forrester.com/information_management.
Boris, you are so right. The cost of BI increases and output fails to achieve real time and pervasive requirements. I simply had to comment as I so often run into the same complaints. Instaknow is an alternative.
This AI platform outstrips most BI purposes deploying realtime operational dashbaords and automating processes that remediate most yellow and red alerts. Can port structured and unstructure data from disparate dilos andthe WEB into the OLAP (DW)or into a dashbaord format ypassing the need for OLAP. Read a BI output (report) and automate decision making or provide essential decision empowerment for a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time requireed by free or commercial BI platforms. Can be used in conjunction with BI to reducce costs and time to solutions. We will be helping countless state and local agencies in meeting ARRA regs. No ETL required. No code. No changes to other systems. 3 patents. Jeff Sherer, SVP, 732-261-0074
I have now concluded BI is only expensive when you don't know what you want to do. 5 days of services and $20k in software license was NOT expensive for us to reduce our reporting timeframe from 5 to 2 days, totally eliminate the manual stuff we were doing in Excel and have 3 staff members no longer working double shifts to get the reporting done. We kept it small, focussed and simple and got a great result. This isthe alternative.