The TouchPad Finally Sells — At 80% Off

By VERNE G. KOPYTOFF

Hewlett-Packard finally found a way to get shoppers to buy its TouchPad tablet — a steep discount — but not until after it had pulled the plug on the device because of poor sales.

A liquidation sale on Saturday set off demand that H.P.’s computer division only wishes it had seen in July, when the tablet first appeared in stores. It cleared the inventories at H.P.’s online store along with those of Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Target, Sam’s Club and Office Depot. The situation at bricks and mortar retailers was a bit confused, with reports of some stores offering the discount with a little prodding and others, such as Best Buy, waiting until Sunday to do so in stores.

H.P. cut the price of the TouchPad to as low as $100 for the 16 gigabyte version and $150 for the 32GB version. When introduced a month and a half ago, the tablets were listed at $500 for the 16GB version and $600 for the 32GB version (they were subsequently discounted by 20 percent).

The fire sale is an ignominious end to the TouchPad, a would-be competitor to Apple’s iPad. Although H.P.’s executives touted the TouchPad as a credible challenger in the burgeoning tablet market, it never generated much interest with consumers. Leo Apotheker, the company’s chief executive, quickly killed it as part of a larger corporate overhaul.

Hours after putting the device on sale on Saturday, H.P.’s online store put up a notice saying that it was “out of stock” and to “check back soon.” The intense traffic overwhelmed the Web site at times.

H.P. is asking that people still interested in buying a TouchPad sign up for alerts about future availability.

Not all retailers are participating in the price, at least as of Sunday afternoon. Amazon.com, for example, listed the TouchPad for sale without the steep discount. However, it did offer the discount briefly as part of its lightning deals.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/the-touchpad-finally-sells-at-80-off/

Pentaho Announces Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.2

Pentaho Announces Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.2
http://www.pentaho.org/news/releases/20060816_open_bi.php

New Release Adds Report Templates, Drag & Drop BI Workflows & More

San Francisco, CA (LinuxWorld Expo, August 16, 2006) - Pentaho Corp., creator of the world’s most popular open source business intelligence (BI) suite, today announced the near-term availability of Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.2, which offers significant ease-of-use enhancements and the broadest open source BI offering available. Upgrades include report templates, new chart types, drag-and-drop BI workflows, and a variety of enhancements to increase administrator productivity.
This release expands on the capabilities that Pentaho introduced in version 1.0 in December of 2005 as the first credible open source alternative to proprietary BI suites. The broad functionality, flexible architecture and open source model of the Pentaho suite have attracted a worldwide user base and community and made it the world’s most popular open source BI suite.
Enhancements to Pentaho Report Designer
In Pentaho Open Suite BI 1.2, the graphical drag-and-drop Pentaho Report Designer adds a series of report templates that make it easy for organizations to create and reuse a standard library of sales, financial, HR or other reports. The new release also offers additional chart types, created and contributed by Pentaho’s vibrant open source community. The updated release also includes a tree display of each report showing all report objects, an interactive property editor, multi-selection and editing of objects, subtotals, conditional formatting, and other capabilities that make it easy to quickly create sophisticated, visually rich reports. Together, these capabilities expand the market for open source BI, and make Pentaho’s best-in-class BI capabilities accessible to a much larger audience.
“We’re very pleased with the capabilities of Pentaho Report Designer,” said Bryan Senseman, CTO, of OpenBI. “The addition of Pentaho’s Report Designer greatly simplifies report design and development tasks and makes Pentaho’s market-leading open source BI platform even more accessible to mainstream BI implementers and users.”
Enhancements to Pentaho Design Studio
Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.2 contains numerous enhancements to the Pentaho Design Studio, where administrators create and maintain BI applications. The user interface has been streamlined and now supports drag-and-drop creation of BI workflows with a new design panel that provides a graphical, flowchart-style view of BI workflows, including report bursting, business logic and more.
To enhance administrator productivity, Pentaho Design Studio has also added an embedded report design wizard that allows administrators to create reports without leaving the Design Studio; integration with Pentaho Data Integration to allow administrators to define or edit data transformations within the same interface; and a new embedded preview capability for fast and easy validation of changes to BI applications.
The Broadest Offering in Open Source BI
Pentaho Open Suite BI is designed to help organizations gain an integrated view of valuable business information that is scattered across disparate applications and databases, whether related to customer service, sales performance, internal efficiency or global performance. Since Pentaho 1.0, Pentaho has added best-in-class data integration capabilities covering extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) as well as enterprise information integration (EII) to consolidate the information in these data silos. This provides flexibility for large-scale batch updates or on-demand integration of data while also allowing Pentaho to address a wide range of user challenges.
“Our research shows that having a complete BI offering is the most valuable feature in an open source BI offering,” said Dan Everett, Research Director at Ventana Research. “Users are clearly looking for more than just reporting in open source BI offerings.”
The Pentaho suite also provides the broadest and deepest offering available in open source business intelligence, spanning reporting, analysis, dashboards, BI platform, data integration, and more, with a flexible, modular architecture that allows users to leverage only the functionality they need. Organizations that only need to embed reporting in their departmental applications, for example, can deploy Pentaho Reporting in an embedded scenario without any other components of the Pentaho Open BI Suite. Organizations that need to address a critical data integration problem can use Pentaho Data Integration without any other Pentaho components.
“Our Pentaho suite continues to evolve at a pace that could never have been achieved without a community-based development and distribution model, and Pentaho 1.2 offers significant enhancements for our community, customers and partners,” said Richard Daley, CEO of Pentaho. “This release sets a new standard for ease of use, breadth, and flexibility in open source BI.”
Availability
Development builds of Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.2 are currently available to the community at /download. General Availability with full testing and validation is planned for September. For more information, visit www.pentaho.org .
About Pentaho
Pentaho provides a full spectrum of open source Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities including reporting, analysis, dashboards, data mining, data integration, and a BI platform that have made it the world’s most popular open source BI suite. Formed by a highly experienced team of industry veterans, Pentaho’s mission is to bring innovative, high quality technology and professional support to the BI market. Pentaho uses a revolutionary approach to development, distribution and support made possible by an open source business model. Pentaho is the primary sponsor and owner of popular open source projects including Mondrian, JFreeReport, and Kettle, Pentaho’s technologies support a wide range of business initiatives from sales and profitability analysis, customer analysis, HR reporting, Financial reporting, KPI dashboards, Supply Chain analytics, and operational reporting.

RSA Security Selects JasperSoft

RSA Security Selects JasperSoft to Provide Reporting Capabilities
for Improved Compliance Monitoring and Security

Monday May 8, 8:30 am ET
JasperDecisions Technology Cornerstone of RSA(R) Reporting & Compliance Manager

SAN FRANCISCO, May 8 /PRNewswire/ -- JasperSoft Corporation, the leader in open source business intelligence, today announced that RSA Security Inc. is using JasperDecisions to provide state-of-the-art reporting, auditing and monitoring functionality to customers leveraging RSA ClearTrust® access management software.

Specifically, RSA® Reporting & Compliance Manager embeds JasperSoft's commercial, Java-based JasperDecisions report server technology to offer centralized reporting capabilities to RSA ClearTrust® access management software customers.

By incorporating JasperDecisions to deliver highly interactive, mission- critical information, RSA Security is helping customers more easily comply with security requirements and industry regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and others.

"Enterprises worldwide face increasing regulatory pressure to verify access controls, monitor user activity and prove user authorization, particularly within their identity and access management infrastructure," said Karen Devine, director of product marketing at RSA Security. "JasperDecisions gives RSA Security a very flexible and powerful way to enable customers to view compliance data, reducing the logging and reporting headaches that companies often encounter within their identity management systems."

Built-in, customizable reports generated by JasperDecisions allow RSA ClearTrust access management software users to more easily review access rights, monitor user activities and pin-point conflicts by quickly tracking user rights.

"More and more software companies like RSA Security are choosing JasperDecisions over competing products because of its flexible, modular architecture, which makes it easy to embed into any Java application," said Ian Fyfe, director of product management at JasperSoft. "JasperSoft's operational reporting technology puts decision-making power in the hands of front-line workers, who are charged detailed day-to-day activities."

JasperDecisions provides a sophisticated platform that enables secure and controlled broad distribution of operational reporting throughout an organization and via web portals to customers and partners. It provides pixel- perfect charting and ready-to-print reporting with full drill-down, filtering and reporting customization capabilities. It also includes flexible data access and output options to PDF, HTML, XML, CSV, XLS, RTF, TXT.

About JasperSoft

JasperSoft (http://www.jaspersoft.com/) is the leader in open source business intelligence (BI). With more than one million downloads and 10,000 corporate deployments in 50 countries, JasperSoft offers the most widely used open source BI software in the world.

The company's JasperIntelligence architecture is comprised of open source server, report design, analytics, and commercial software for scalable enterprise applications. JasperSoft is based in San Francisco and is backed by leading venture capital firms Morgenthaler Ventures, Doll Capital Management, Discovery Ventures, and Partech International.

NOTE: RSA, RSA Security and ClearTrust are either registered trademarks or trademarks of RSA Security Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other products and services mentioned are trademarks of their respective companies.

Contact: Sarah Conway of Page One PR, +1-978-969-3010, or sarah@pageonepr.com, for JasperSoft.
Source: JasperSoft Corporation

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060508/sfm101.html?.v=42

Open Source Business Intelligence: JasperSoft Ups the Ante

Open Source Business Intelligence: JasperSoft Ups the Ante
JasperSoft last week took its open source BI proposition to the next level, announcing new BI server and analytic components.
By Stephen Swoyer
5/3/2006

In the open-source business intelligence (BI) space, the JasperReports reporting library is arguably as well known—especially to J2EE developers and others of the codejockeying cognoscenti—as Crystal Reports is to Visual Studio coders.

Although it remains an active open-source project, JasperReports last year was commercialized by JasperSoft Corp. (the former Panscopic) which bundled a report authoring client (iReport), a portal-based, embeddable reporting engine (JasperDecisions), and other complementary enhancements with the vanilla JasperReports library. That was just the beginning, however.

At last week’s MySQL User’s Conference, held in Santa Clara, JasperSoft announced its most ambitious deliverable to date—an open source BI suite, dubbed JasperIntelligence, which the company says it will roll out over the next few months.

Anchored by JasperSoft’s new JasperServer deliverable—BI server middleware that’s available in both commercial and open-source variants (the latter of which is available under the terms of the ubiquitous GPL)—JasperIntelligence also boasts and analytic component, JasperAnalytics, which JasperSoft says they expect to announce sometime this month.

Other JasperIntelligence components include (of course) JasperReports, along with JasperDesigner (an open-source report design tool), JasperETL, and JasperDecisions. As for the new JasperServer deliverable, it’s written in Java and supports PHP, Perl, Python and other scripting languages. It’s designed to operate as either a standalone server or as a Web services reporting engine.

JasperSoft officials say JasperServer reports can also be embedded into both Java and non-Java applications. JasperServer can generate reports in most common formats, including HTML, PDF, Excel and Word. It uses HTTP, SOAP, Web services, and Java APIs to communicate with other applications, and can retrieve data using JDBC, POJO and XML.
JasperAnalytics, for its part, will support slicing and dicing, pivoting, filtering, charting, and drill-down, officials say. It, too, is an open-source Java deliverable.

JasperSoft officials position the company’s new suite as an SME-friendly play. Their argument might seem counterintuitive, at least in an SME market that’s dominated by Microsoft-oriented BI solutions and staffed by Microsoft-oriented BI professionals.

Consider the case of Luke Philips, a software engineer with a prominent U.S. telco provider. An enthusiastic user of a rival open-source reporting solution (the Eclipse Foundation’s BI Reporting Tool, or BIRT), Philips says he doubts whether a combined Java and open-source BI stack could flourish at his company. “We don’t have a lot of Java expertise in the BI portion of our IT shop.

As a consequence, we will not make use of [projects such as] Mondrian or Pentaho anytime soon,” he comments. If anything, he says, his employer would instead pursue an open-source and SQL Server 2005 approach. “It is possible we could use open-source .Net tools in this space. We are using BIRT as a reporting tool primarily from the OLTP area at the moment.”

In this respect, a J2EE-oriented, quasi-open-source solution such as JasperIntelligence might seem like a tough sell, but JasperSoft CEO Paul Doscher says SMEs will embrace the economics of open-source BI, which is more affordable than commercial alternative.

“Open source is the key to solving people’s frustration with complex, inflexible, and overpriced BI solutions from large proprietary software vendors that have taken their customers’ IT systems hostage,” said Doscher, in a statement.

“Customers want BI for everyone in their organization. JasperSoft is committed to giving businesses freedom of choice with JasperIntelligence, an affordable, open and extensible BI architecture that empowers everyone within an organization, from those in the board room to accounts receivables.”

The company’s decision to exhibit at the MySQL User Conference wasn’t an accident. According to MySQL AB’s own polling, JasperReports is the most popular reporting engine for the MySQL database, used by about 40 percent of all MySQL shops within the MySQL community. More than 40 percent of MySQL users who responded to the survey said they were using or considering JasperReports.

Stephen Swoyer is a technology writer based in Athens, Ga. You can contact Stephen via E-mail at swoyerse@percipient-analytics.com.

http://www.esj.com/business_intelligence/article.aspx?EditorialsID=7935

Open Source Business Intelligence Goes Mainstream

May 04, 2006 08:00 AM US Eastern Timezone

Open Source Business Intelligence Goes Mainstream; Comprehensive Study from Leading Research Firm Highlights Rapid Adoption of Open Source BI

ORLANDO, FLa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 4, 2006--Pentaho Corp., the world's leading provider of Open Source Business Intelligence (BI) software, in cooperation with Ventana Research, announced the results of a recent study, "Open Source BI: Ready to Play in the Big Leagues," which provides a compelling view into trends related to the adoption of open source BI based on data from more than 300 surveyed organizations. The survey results, available for download from www.pentaho.org, give a view into current usage of open source BI, plans for future deployments, and primary considerations and drivers in choosing open source BI. Pentaho was proud to sponsor the study, and to work with Ventana Research and other sponsors to provide a clear view into the state of open source BI adoption.

Rapid Adoption

Open source technologies have already driven significant change and evolution in major software markets including operating systems, databases, development tools, and more. The recent research from Ventana Research suggests that the same dynamics are rapidly transforming the business intelligence market.

Among organizations surveyed, more than 20% had already deployed open source business intelligence. Another 19% were in development with open source BI, with an additional 43% currently considering open source BI. The results of this primary research clearly show that open source business intelligence has made its way into many organizations.

Poised for Growth

According to the survey, open source BI deployments are likely to grow significantly. For example, 11% of organizations were already deploying open source BI to 1,000 or more users, with more than 38% planning to support more than 1,000 users at full deployment. And only 4% of survey respondents indicated that they did not plan to deploy additional open source BI software.

Clear Requirements

The survey also asked respondents for the most valuable features in open source BI. Organizations indicated that having a complete BI suite - including reporting, dashboards, OLAP support, alerting and more - was the most valuable feature of open source BI. This validates Pentaho's approach of providing a flexible, modular architecture while delivering a full suite of BI capabilities. So for example, organizations who only need reporting or dashboards in the immediate future can use an embeddable, componentized offering that provides only the capabilities that they need today, while still giving them a clear path to a complete, open source BI suite down the road.

Advantages Over Proprietary, Commercial BI

The survey also asked organizations to compare their satisfaction across a range of criteria between open source and proprietary or "commercial" business intelligence. Survey respondents indicated that open source BI was more capable than proprietary BI in areas including database support, openness and flexibility, reliability, and cost of ownership. The data clearly refutes the notion that open source BI is simply a cost-driven decision.

Dan Everett, Research Director for Ventana Research will present and analyze the findings of the survey at 9am pacific time today, May 4th.

For more details and to register, please visit www.ventanaresearch.com. "This research will be an 'eye opener' for those unfamiliar with open source BI," said Dan Everett. "There is clear evidence that open source BI is penetrating the market quickly, that open source BI deployments are growing, and that many factors beyond cost are driving organizations to consider and deploy open source BI."

"We've always said, 'Don't use us because we're cheaper, use us because we're better,'" said Richard Daley, CEO of Pentaho. "Open source BI is bringing BI to new users and geographies, and is making BI a seamlessly integrated part of many applications. Anyone interested to see what's making open source BI so popular is invited to www.pentaho.org to download, try, and use the Pentaho Open BI Suite."

About Pentaho

Pentaho provides a full spectrum of open source Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities including reporting, analysis, dashboards, data mining, data integration, and a BI platform. Formed by a highly experienced team of industry veterans, Pentaho's mission is to bring innovative, high quality technology and professional support to the BI market. Pentaho uses a revolutionary approach to development, distribution and support made possible by an open source business model. Pentaho's technologies support a wide range of business initiatives from sales and profitability analysis, customer analysis, HR reporting, Financial reporting, KPI dashboards, Supply Chain analytics, and operational reporting.

For more information: Pentaho's web site is located at www.pentaho.org.

Open Source: The Intelligence Behind Business?

April 24, 2006 Open Source: The Intelligence Behind Business?

By Sean Michael Kerner
Enterprises can now get their business intelligence open source style. Pentaho and JasperSoft have updated their BI platforms as each vendor ramps up efforts to gain a slice of the BI pie.

For its part, JasperSoft claims that its open source BI software is already deployed in over 10,000 businesses and has had more than 1 million downloads. JasperSoft just added a server offering and a new suite that encompasses its entire architecture of BI solutions. The server software, JasperServer, is intended to allow users to generate BI reports either as a standalone server or as a Web services reporting engine.

Reports may be generated in any number of different formats, including HTML, PDF, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word. The server integrates with existing enterprise infrastructure via Web Services, Java APIs and HTTP.
The new Jasper suite, called JasperIntelligence, includes JasperServer, as well as JasperReports (BI reporting), JasperDesigner (BI reports designer), JasperAnalytics, JasperETL (data warehouse term which stands for Extracting, Transforming (or Transporting) and Loading) and JasperDecisions.

Barry Klawans, CTO at JasperSoft told internetnews.com that JasperReports has been widely deployed because there haven't been too many barriers to adoption of JasperSoft's software. "The biggest barrier to JasperReports a year ago was the lack of support, and we quickly fixed that one," Klawans said. "The main barrier since then has been with folks who want a turn-key solution, not a reporting library that requires writing code to integrate it into an existing application."

Klawans expects that JasperServer should solve that problem, as it can run as a stand-alone server, be embedded in another Java Web application or be invoked as a Web service. "We even included PHP objects that hide the web service complexity and allow PHP developers to interact with PHP objects that talk to our server," Klawans explained.

Open source startup Pentaho recently launched Pentaho BI Suite Professional Edition and Pentaho Reporting Server Professional Edition. The Professional Edition of Pentaho's BI suite builds on top of Pentaho's open suite with additional enterprise capabilities.

For example the professional edition allows users to store data in proprietary databases, such as Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle, in addition to the open source MySQL database. License indemnifications as well as commercial support are also key parts of Pentaho's professional offerings.

Pentaho and JasperSoft differ in a number of key areas, according to JasperSoft's top executives. CEO Paul A. Doscher told internetnews.com that, as opposed to Pentaho, JasperSoft is developing an open source BI suite that is modular in design. That design allows developers to customize the user experience and focus on delivering operational BI to everyone through integration in today's applications and business processes.

The two open source BI vendors aren't necessarily in competition with each other, though. "Is Pentaho the competition? " asked JasperSoft CTO Klawans. "I talk to the folks there fairly frequently, and we both think the real competition is the established BI players."

Cognos is one such established BI player, and it doesn't necessarily see open source as a direct competitor, either.
"Although we are hearing more from open source BI companies through the media, we do not see these organizations in competitive sales situations," Don Campbell, vice president of platform strategy and innovation, told internetnews.com.

"Much of the need for open source BI comes from smaller companies looking to implement a BI or mere reporting solution on a smaller scale, not a full solution across the organization." Campell sees open source BI as a good alternative for the mid-market customer who wants to get a better handle on their business.

However, Cognos believes that in order to truly unlock the potential for more complex reporting and scalability from business intelligence, an enterprise-scale BI tool such as that from Cognos is necessary. At the same time, Cognos embraces open source as a developer platform and is an active member of the developer community, involved in initiatives such as the Eclipse Foundation.

"In fact, Cognos uses open source to help the company concentrate on the differentiating value Cognos brings to its customers by leveraging open source for the non-essential parts of Cognos' solution," Campbell said. Open source BI, at least the solution provided by JasperSoft, may well serve to expand the market beyond that which the traditional proprietary players like Cognos have served.

"I think open source BI has the capability of reaching an entirely new class of users and enabling a new type of usage. And not just because of the price," JasperSoft's Klawans said. "All the established BI companies have been around for quite some time now, and are designed to be a monolithic system that allows a sophisticated analyst to explore your data in all sorts of ways.

"They are quite good at that, but their tools are just not suitable for the average user," Klawans continued.
"Open source BI has the opportunity to bring the key features of business intelligence to a much broader user base by designing the tools for a less technical user and allowing the key BI features to be accessed from within business applications."

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3601326

Open-Source Platform Aims At Business Intelligence

Open-Source Platform Aims At Business Intelligence
By Ed Scannell, VARBusinessVARBusiness, Tue. Nov. 01, 2005 -->

The open-source community is looking to get more intelligent about business intelligence.Two companies on Tuesday unwrapped the first open-source suite for the development of business intelligence projects that will be able to go up against the latest technologies and strategies delivered by Microsoft and IBM.

Spearheaded by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica and ObjectWeb, SpagoBI essentially is a unified collection of analytical tools, including those for static reporting and analysis, data-mining techniques, a structured control suite and a number of dashboard components.The new business-intelligence platform can be integrated with the existing ObjectWeb stack of open-source middleware projects, including the eXo Platform, which is a Java enterprise-class portal, and JOnAS, an application server that complies with the 1.4 version of Java Enterprise Edition 2.0 (J2EE).

Because it is based purely on open-source code, company executives from Engineering Ingegneria and ObjectWeb believe their platform offers developers and VARs a cheaper, faster way to deliver business-intelligence solutions compared to the competitive offerings of Microsoft and IBM."A company like Microsoft focuses on its own products like SQL Server, Office and SharePoint, and expects you to buy its entire suite in order to use its business-intelligence components. But our approach allows you to mix and match components that extend the range of BI-based solutions," says Gabriele Ruffatti, architecture and consulting director of Engineering's Research and Innovation Division.

With the flexibility to mix and match a wider range of components, users and VARs can collect, analyze and distribute more relevant data, officials from the companies contend. The encouraging trend for those pursuing open-source-based business-intelligence strategies is that more proprietary vendors are willing to lay bare their application programming interfaces (APIs), allowing open-source applications to work with them."As more and more commercial vendors provide APIs that let things like CRM or ERP applications communicate with other, [SpagoBI] will be able to integrate with more systems, giving people a much broader and federated view of all their data no matter where it is," says Jean-Pierre Laisne, ObjectWeb chairman and Linux and open source strategy manager for Bull.

Microsoft officials, of course, do not believe their business-intelligence products and strategies are closed and more expensive.They believe that by supporting XML and SQL Server Analysis Services, Microsoft's business-intelligence-related products, most notably the next version of Excel, can tap into any server-based application, including Oracle's database and SAP's software."We are putting end user [business intelligence] capabilities directly into Office because that is where customers want them, and that will allow BI to reach what we see as huge potential in companies," says Chris Caren, general manager of office business applications at Microsoft.

Other proprietary competitors do not see open-source competitors as serious threats, particularly at the high end of the business-intelligence market. Some believe many open-source competitors do not have the necessary one-stop offerings that large enterprises are looking for."The open-source BI movement is an interesting sideshow, but is the enterprise the natural market for this stuff?

The Global 3,500 type of companies have the most complex data sets and need complex infrastructures that make a single view of the truth hard to do," says Neal Hill, vice president of corporate development at Congas.Hill and some other observers think open-source vendors can contribute useful pieces of code that could complement a user's existing proprietary software, but it could be years before any emerge as serious competitors at the high
end.

http://www.varbusiness.com/components/weblogs/article.jhtml?articleId=173401683

Open source business intelligence

Open source business intelligence
Low-cost alternatives to costly reporting tools will arrive soon
By Neil McAllisterAugust 08, 2005
Customers and ISVs face steep fees when licensing existing BI software, so it's only logical that work on BI within the open source community is heating up. First out of the gate was the Eclipse Foundation, which has made BI one of its seven top-level projects.

The Foundation released Version 1.0 of its BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) in June, under its own, Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved Eclipse License. BIRT is designed primarily as a reporting system for Java-based Web applications. It consists of two parts. One is a JAR (Java Archive) file containing run-time components to be deployed on an application server. The other is a report designer that ships as an Eclipse plug-in, offering easy WYSIWYG editing and a palette of standard report items.

The package is based on a framework called Open Data Access, which allows great flexibility when selecting data sources.For those requiring professional support, maintenance, and training, a company called Actuate offers all of the above for BIRT technologies. In addition, Actuate packages its own version of BIRT under a commercial license that includes intellectual property indemnification. Another organization worth watching is Pentaho, a startup dedicated to developing a complete open source BI platform, including reporting, analysis, dashboards, data mining, and workflow tools.

The company's development team claims it has members with past experience working on BI applications at companies such as Cognos (Profile, Products, Articles), Oracle (Profile, Products, Articles), and SAS. The project's main server architecture will be built on J2EE, with an accompanying client environment that, similar to BIRT, will be based on Eclipse. The developers have taken pains to incorporate modern technologies into their platform, such as XML definitions for all content and Web services interfaces for the analytical components, with a mind toward maximum flexibility.

No downloads were available from Pentaho as of this writing, but the company says it plans to ship versions of all its projects by year's end under the LGPL (Lesser General Public License) and what it calls "LGPL-type" licenses, including Apache, BSD, and Eclipse. A detailed road map is available on the project site.

Although it may be vaporware for the time being, Pentaho has all the makings of a serious contender in the BI marketplace. The project's developers say: "We don't expect you to adopt it simply because it's open; we expect that you will choose it because it's better." We'll check back in a few months to see how well they've delivered.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/08/08/32FEossbi_1.html?s=feature

Discovering Open Source

Join me in discovering what the Information Technology world has to offer - open source et al;