New Report Details The Rise of Business Intelligence Software

by Sam Dean - Aug. 12, 2010Comments (1)

Not long ago, OStatic did an examination of Business Intelligence (BI) software applications and suites, and it got a lot of notice. That's probably because BI is one of the fastest-growing categories in the whole open source arena. In fact, when we covered the results of North Bridge Partners' 2009 Future of Open Source Survey, I noted that many of the respondents said that they see open source Business Intelligence applications as highly likely to cause disruption in the next five years. Now, there are new signs that BI software is gaining solid entrenchment.

Business Intelligence applications are used to better understand historical, current and future aspects of business operations. The applications typically offer ways to mine database- and spreadsheet-centric data, and produce graphical, table-based and other types of analytics regarding business operations. The proprietary applications in this space have typically focused on expensive enterprise licenses, and the open source alternatives have quickly become compatible with commonly used applications such as Excel, and are feature-rich.

In a new Forrester Research report on BI software, "Actuate BIRT led the pack because of richness of reporting functionality." Jaspersoft Enterprise, SpagoBI, Pentaho Enterprise and Pentaho Community "are close behind and also offer much fuller and broader BI stack than Actuate BIRT, including extract, transform and load (ETL) and advanced analytics functionality," the report concluded.

If you haven't seen the latest and greates BI applications and suites, and if you are at all involved with business data, it's worth brushing up on this software category. Take a look at our initial survey of the players, and read our interview with Jaspersoft's CEO.

While many people reach for spreadsheets and the like to crunch business data, the Forrester report is yet another signal that BI software tools will become widely used as well.

Previous: Did Open Source Need...Next: Apertus Project Buil... Browse Blog

by Aran Nathanson on Sep. 01, 2010

I think that two real revolutions are going to take place in this space.

First, people who do analysis will no longer be dependent on people who manage technology because of tools that leverage the existing infrastructure; more powerful and cheap hardware along with know and understood applications most notably Excel. Currently, analysts either have to also have sophisticated technology skills or they have to do what I call get yesterday's data tomorrow.

Second, it will become ever easier to share the results of analysis so that business intelligence will actually lead to good decision making.

Clearly in any organization the only intelligent part of business intelligence is people, so no matter how good the technology gets you'll always need skilled analysts. The good news is that they won't also need PhD's in computer science to get their hands on the data.

0 Votes