Open Source in Business Intelligence

‘Open source’ has been the buzzword in almost all aspects concerning enterprises, ranging from operating systems to storage. It has spread its tentacles to include even Business Intelligence and analytics, which is testified the popularity of Hadoop and Spark. The expansion pace of the open source market raises a very basic question on the future of proprietary software for analytics—such as those of Oracle, IBM or even Microsoft—whether or not it would survive the competition wagered by open source offerings. This calls for a comprehensive analysis of the advantages and disadvantages associated with the open source and close source product categories.

Most advantages associated with the open source product category, generally hold good for analytics, as well. The ease of downloading, absence of licensing or even the scope for customizing source code to suit the needs of enterprise, apply for the analytics product domain too. The absence of license costs simplifies the task of building prototypes and testing with minimum investment.

Like other domains, Open source Business Intelligence (OSBI) too has a developer community that is constantly working towards innovating and improving the products. Organizations can leverage the frequently enhanced features offered by the community, to their benefit. The advantages get accentuated further by the inclusive and integrated business intelligence stack featuring the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL), dynamic dashboards for predictive analytics, besides the data mining software. On the contrary, commercial products tend to be specialized in a subset of tools required for analytics. The dynamic discussion forum of open source analytics software doubles up as a customer support platform for the enterprises.

The absence of intellectual property rights tends to reduce the total cost of ownership, which is a huge draw for open source products. Further, companies having a robust programmer team that can alter the code to suit their requirements, find it easier to customize the product.