What is the future of open source business intelligence?

+1 to Mickael's comment re: progressing up the pyramid of maturity/capability and increasing your reliance on experienced people. This is one of the next hurdles for BI (ie remove the need for a $1k/$2k a day resource) and one that several companies are working towards e.g. Msft with PowerPivot, aimed directly at the user who already knows how to use Excel, similar with others such as Qlikview/tech etc.

But back on topic re: Open Source BI and what will it do? It will definitely keep and likely grow it's market share but like with Pentaho, I think this will be based less on the fact that it's free (for community editions) and more on the feature set it provides. Again, combined with an organizations maturity in BI, this will dictate the direction they for when sourcing the software - I won't take something that's free that does half of what I need, the opportunity cost in *not* getting what I need significantly outweighs the fact that I got something for free.

Andrea, it is clear that only the companies themselves can give an accurate answer for the first question (wich are really profitable). But I guess at least one or two are. My reasoning (unstructured) points are:

. To the best of my knowledge, open source companies are in general lean (not necessarily really small operations) so I suppose OSBI companies follow this rule.
. Lean companies do not need billionaire revenues to be reasonably profitable.
. Pentaho, for example, claims 400 new customers and 120% more revenue last year. 120% more revenue means nothing, but 400 customers are not a small achievment.
. Pentaho, Jasper, Spago, to name some, have a decent number of commercial partners worldwide. Commercial partners usually are in for the money, so this is a good hint of viability. An example: a Jasper partner in Rio de Janeiro reports a few top Brazil companies - including Petrobrás - as customers. Not a game for kids so I guess there is profit here.
. Fortune 500 companies do have an eye on OSBI due to good quality and better cost . Fortune 500 companies do sign licensing and support agreements, so again there is money involved.
. Open source attractiveness only depends upon low economics when it lacks quality. This is not the case for OSBI wich has reached enterprise level quality.
. Everyone wants BI these days. Big players like B.O. are really expensive.

So, I would bet a can of Coke: there is profitability here. And that leads us to the other question, wich is: who will survive?

There is a cynical answer here: It doesn't matter. That's how market works. Some thrive, some perish. Maybe only one will survive as a for-profit company, all others falling back to pure community projects or even disappearing. Business as usual.

Of course this points may be naive, or just plain wrong. It would be good if I knew actual figures for BI market. So this is just my vision.

Regards, Mauricio.

Well, the open source and Free software is The future of software :)

Open Source is not a question mark anymore. The model is already proved as self sustained when enough demand, good quality and professional management are present.

BI is one of the areas where this is happening, and many open products like the ones Fred listed are being seriously considered even in large corporations. For smaller shops, enough features meet attractive costs, as Fred stated. In a pure capitalistic way, the top rated ones seem to be doing well.

I have seen a report (not allowed to disclose), projecting growth in open BI world in the short term, for large companies. So far, no worries, it seems.

Just to follow up my post, here is a recent article (Jan 13/2011):
"Pentaho Announces Record Growth, Adds 400 New Customers"
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Pentaho-Announces-Record-Growth-Adds-...

I would perhaps add a caveat to Fred's answer about the low risk. As soon as BI transcends the 'reporting dimension' the platform/source starts to lose in importance to people (people as in domain experts, stakeholders and decision makers). Then to really break through you may need to be able to extend support in both dimensions. That said, as things are progressing there is and will be ample room for smaller players to offer and grow nimbler nishe BI-products that fit the average business needs really really good.

As everything in a business point of view, this subject can be summarized in a couple ideas: what features one needs (or wants) and how much one is willing to spend. Big businesses have big bucks to spend and can go with traditional products like B.O. However, even the big ones are looking carefully to open alternatives. This is a fact.

Small and medium shops work on much tighter budgets, so even considering development costs the absence of licensing fees is a godsend. If, and this is a reasonable scenery, requirements are basic and no development is needed, TCO get better yet. The news are, small budget companies are being allowed to enter BI arena because of open products. Many do not need full featured complex projects, maybe only cube navigators and advanced reporting.

I have tested and quoted products like Pentaho, Business Objects, Palo, Jasper. For B.O., a basic version for SMEs can easily reach US$15,000.00 or more (as for 1 year and a half ago) only for upfront licensing.

Sure big companies still prefer traditional providers, but for smaller shops open BI is already an option and the forecast is good.

The jury is still out. Although the software is free with open source platforms, the development costs still need to be recovered somewhere somehow, mostly in implementation. That may put a higher floor for the minimum project size, which does not dobe well for small businesses.

The combination of cloud and open source does have a bright future.

Bottom line is that you have to look at TCO and compare. Most of the comparisons that I have done show that TCO is lower with open source solutions. BTW - open source doesn't mean free. It just means that the source is open, and the development is done by a community of interested parties. Some of the developers may be paid by the sponsoring organizations or other entities that support open source for various reasons. That is why development cost is lower. So are marketing costs, overhead etc. There are a lot of misconceptions and myths. We have to look at real examples. Otherwise, we are just speculating.

I agree that the cloud and open source combination will be even better.

Are we talking open source or free of charge software in this discussion?

@Gertjan, I understand we are talking open source. All major open BI products do mix free downloads and "enterprise" versions, and the original question was not specific. Both free/gratis and paid versions have market share.

@mauricio Actually not all. SpagoBI have only one version of the suite that is 100% free and open source. Open-core is not the only adopted business model in the osbi domain.

Andrea, thanks. I forgot Spago, shame on me.

Ok the future of osbi seem to be bright. But is it the same for the companies that backed osbi? Which of them is really profitable? Which of them can survive in a less critical worldwide economical situation without any more foundings fom VC? I hope to see key players in osbi domain answer to these questions here: http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2011/01/19/who-is-profiting-from-open...