Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Survey of open source business intelligence adoption

A new research report published by BeyeNETWORK analyzes people's use of open source BI. It is gratifying to see Pentaho, and Pentaho projects Mondrian and Kettle, at the top of their categories. Weka, another Pentaho project, is a a narrow second to R for statistics/data mining.

With 1,000 respondents in small, medium and large companies, this is not a small survey. Pentaho's dominance across several categories makes Jaspersoft's recent claim to be the most widely deployed BI software pretty difficult to believe.

Pentaho's strategy has been to build a suite of best-of-breed open source components, foster those components and their communities, and integrate them into a design-time and run-time platform. This report shows that this strategy is paying off.

The paper covers the bad stuff (performance problem areas, barriers to adoption) as well as the good, and surveys the information sources that people found useful in troubleshooting and getting to successful deployments. If you are evaluating open source BI products, the paper is well worth a read.

4 comments:

Daniel Lemire said...

That is interesting, but why not make the document publicly available especially if it says good things? I know you are not in charge of marketing for Pentaho, but I'd love to discuss such a document in a class of mine. It would be a *lot* simpler if I could just link to it. As it is, I have to register to get to the document... a pain. I might as well mail order it.

Julian Hyde said...

I'm not fond of registering to get whitepapers, but we both know why vendors do it. This particular registration is painless, and you can opt out of being contacted or being included on any mailing list. Considerably easier and faster than mail order!

Daniel Lemire said...

Sure I understand how this come about, with the best intentions.

But Pentaho should be "get" "social media". I am not going to blog about a white paper I cannot link to. I have nearly 2,000 readers, several of them are decision makers.

I'm not going to email my class (many of them will be decision makers) to tell my students about a white paper they must register for.

I'm not going to tweet a link to this white paper (I have 700 followers on Twitter).

Marketing folks should be aware of the cost of these registration tricks. That's Oracle's style, not Pentaho's.

Ken said...

Daniel, note that the report was not done by Pentaho and they probably do not have the right to redistribute it.