Open source BI continues to improve

BI Business Intelligence News : Open source BI continues to improve by Zack Urlocker

Last week at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Jaspersoft announced their new version 3 suite, aimed at taking the company beyond their namesake widely-used reporting system.

This latest version focuses on ad-hoc BI with a more flexible "Web 2.0" AJAX interface making it easy to build dashboards via drag and drop. By creating metadata domains, the eliminate the need for users to understand the underlying database schemas and queries. You can also easily embed the dashboard in any web application.

JasperSoft's latest update appears to be a significant improvement in making open source BI offerings more competitive in the market. Traditionally, the large scale closed source BI vendors have been able to dismiss open source products as being unproven or too limited in their capabilities. But with the rate of development at JasperSoft, Pentaho and BIRT, I think 2008 is the year that open source BI will start to have serious impact in the market.

If you're a BI "power user" or just a newbie, I'd like to get your thoughts in this area. Do you think the open source companies have what it takes to rival the incumbents? What's been your experience with these products? Let me know.

Source: BI Business Intelligence software information at InfoWorld.com