OStatic

When we recently 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 (BI) applications as highly likely to cause disruption in the next five years. For many people, though, this application category is murky and hard to understand. What do the applications do, and what can you get in the free, open source offerings?

While frugality isn't by any means the only reason a business should consider open source software, it would be foolish to think that the current economic situation isn't making it more attractive to companies. There is often, however, an imposing barrier standing in the way of all-out adoption. The mythical learning curve involved in moving to open source isn't half so steep or intimidating as that first step -- where do we go, what applications are best for us, and how do we put it all together and make it all work?

This week, Red Hat and IT services distribution provider, SYNNEX, announced the formation of the Open Source Channel Alliance. The Alliance's aim is to help value-added resellers and solutions providers deliver all the benefits of open source applications to their customers.

Ever heard of OpenMRS? It's a community-developed, open source electronic medical record system framework. As anybody in the United States knows, it's not that easy to put together any kind of functional electronic system for medical records. OpenMRS has an additional challenge, though: It's focused on making these systems work in developing countries, where AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria cause suffering for millions of people. OpenMRS helps educate and support people in developing countries on how to keep up a sustainable medical records system. Now, open source business intelligence software provider Pentaho is part of the mix.

Are you familiar with Pentaho? The Florida-based company was founded by a team of Business Intelligence (BI) industry veterans from commercial BI companies including Cognos, Hyperion, IBM, Oracle, and more. Pentaho offers a suite of open source BI applications, and, akin to how Red Hat works, gets its revenues from support and management services for its enterprise customers. (It also offers a commercial Enterprise Edition.) We recently checked in with Bill Seyler, a Senior Software Engineer at Pentaho. Among other thoughts, he points out that open source is in need of better monetization models.