The last five years have brought a fresh wave of thinking to the frontier of business intelligence. The advent of massively parallel processing, data appliances, in-memory databases and cloud computing are challenging old technology stereotypes. New demands to confront mission-critical instances of operational data, predictive analytics and unstructured content have arrived in response to a changing wave of business objectives. All this is happening in a lingering climate of cost and resource constraint. A challenge for many organizations is the question, “What can we do next?”
We might start with what we already know, because, amid change, old obstacles persist painfully and cost a lot of money to remedy. An expensive toolbelt of application resources for reporting, dashboards, integration, data movement and change data capture already hangs at the waist of many organizations. Other organizations have simply lacked the financial means to tackle desirable BI-related projects at all because of the high cost of entry.
In that light, an equally old resource, open source software, has spawned commercial startups that also want your money, but likely much less than the name-brand BI product vendors are asking upfront and overall.
The growing appeal of commercial open source vendors is in parts timing and maturity. What you’ll pay for and what you’ll get still has to do with your actual needs and your pocketbook, but we’ll stipulate that the point has been made and isn’t going away. While open source BI revenue remains in the shadow of proprietary commercial off the shelf (COTS) remedies, Gartner Inc. predicts the use of BI tools from open source providers will grow five-fold through 2010.
As for maturity across technologies that include databases, BI and analytics, IT developers are already well acquainted with open source. Forrester Research found that 80 percent of professional developers have already used open source software in at least part of their daily development activities.
For the nontechnical business sponsor looking into open source projects for the first time, some perspective is in order (see sidebar). And for all parties investigating commercial open source, a bit of research will help everyone understand terms such as open source, open core, free software, public domain and shareware (these links are possible starting points, not exhaustive. -ed). Navigating these terms is necessary for shaping your view of what you’re getting into with commercial open source software and how you can benefit.
We can provide a couple of use cases and advice to get you started. We’ll thumbnail how two companies use commercial open source products and end with some reflections on their experience.
Small Business, Broad BI
Peter Schmidt is the director of business intelligence at Centro, a 120-employee media services firm that connects advertising agencies with digital publishers. Across his 18 years in IT, Schmidt had worked on BI platforms using traditional COTS products for U.S. Cellular and others, and built a BI program from the ground up for United Airlines Loyalty Services, where he served as a director of enterprise architecture.
Upon arriving at the much smaller Centro two years ago, Schmidt got his first real taste of open source, but his transition was prepaved. Centro’s most-used application was already open source, a media-planning tool that’s been newly updated and released for online self-service and software as a service delivery at transis.com.
What Centro lacked was corporate visibility to its own data beyond antiquated spreadsheet reporting. After looking into several open source options, the company chose Pentaho’s enterprise suite. “I liked that it was one deep stack where they provide the data integration, the reporting, the OLAP analysis, the predictive mining and machine learning and a platform that glues it all together,” Schmidt says.
And it surely beat the exhaustive nine-month evaluation processes he’d seen at big companies. “About the worst thing that could happen is you picked the wrong thing and it doesn’t scale right away or you have to swap something out. We did our homework, became an enterprise subscription customer at a nominal fee and the rest is history.”
Centro’s BI now supports about 60 self-service reports and analytics for static reporting, parameterized reporting and OLAP dashboards. The main user base has been sales, sales support and sales research. New employees are coming on at Centro, and Schmidt sees no problem in scaling as he improves his services.
Schmidt figures self-service has saved Centro about $80,000 at an hourly IT service rate over the last 15 months based on the 700 to 1,000 data requests per month that used to involve IT gathering and manipulating data. It has freed resources and allowed IT to focus on its core role.
Centro’s goals and data sets were much smaller than those Schmidt ran into at United, though they might be comparable to a departmental project at a large company. Also, the system may not complete everyone’s wish list at Centro, but as new enterprise features arrive, like Pentaho’s “extremely slick” new OLAP analysis front end, Schmidt prefers to focus on the gains.
“I’m always saying, ‘Guess what guys, we didn’t shell out all these hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if it doesn’t do this little thing now, move on,’” says Schmidt. “You’re always trying to make things better, but if you’re smart and calculated, you want to use the parts that work really well for you.”
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