Business Intelligence Suites are crucial for the success of any company. They help us understand past, present and future aspects of the business by mining the company data. Once upon a time, Business Intelligence (BI) software were proprietary software and the exorbitant cost made sure that only big enterprises could afford such software. Just like everything else, open source revolution disrupted the BI market with their low cost, flexible solutions. The combination of Java and LAMP stack were potent enough to build powerful open source BI suites which changed the landscape upside down.
From their modest beginnings in the early part of this decade, open source BI market has grown leaps and bounds in the past several years. According to Ventana Research, based on a survey conduced between Nov. 2005 to Jan. 2006, based on a survey conducted with 320 organizations of all sizes
- 20% of them had already deployed open source BI suites
- another 62% were developing or planning a deployment of open source BI suites
In a recent Northbridge Venture Partners’ 2009 Future of Open Source survey, a solid 28% of the respondents felt that Open Source Business Intelligence will be the most disruptive force in the industry. The open source BI industry, in one stroke, changed the business landscape from BI tools from being a luxury that could be afforded only by big enterprises to something that is affordable even to smaller companies. In short, the open source BI suite leveled the playing field for all business players.
However, even with the proliferation of open source tools in this segment, companies needed some investment on IT personnel to manage the stack on either self hosted servers or with managed hosting providers. It was not very easy for companies to put the grandmas and grandpas to deploy and manage BI stacks. In the mean time, cloud computing came up and helped companies deploy everything in the cloud. One of the key characteristics of clouds is the idea of self service. An ecosystem of cloud management companies mushroomed around these cloud infrastructure providers and offered to help ease the pain of deployment of a wide variety of apps in the cloud. These companies made the cloud deployment of complex software a child’s play. One such company is Rightscale,
Today, they announced a partnership with Jaspersoft, provider of the Most Widely Used Open Source Business Intelligence, Talend, leader in open source data integration software, and Vertica, provider of high-performance analytic database management systems running on industry standard hardware. They have come together to offer an integrated solutions stack that will enable customers to increase agility and lower costs by combining the power of the cloud, a high-performance analytical database, and BI and data integration software. Like many other open source software, it is now possible to deploy Business Intelligence stack with a push of the button from Rightscale management dashboard. Now, everyone from enterprises to neighborhood mom and pop shops can implement BI solutions with a click of a mouse at an extremely low cost.
This marriage of open source and cloud means that it is now possible to implement high performance, highly scalable systems for a very low cost without any need for IT personnel. In an economy that is still struggling to find its way up, such a partnership is very welcome and it further levels the playing field for even smaller businesses to take advantage of BI capabilities. It is a great partnership with far reaching consequences. It is also time for other open source enterprise software companies to jump into the cloud bandwagon.
