“BI Evaluation Economics”

Business intelligence (BI) is a well-established and generally well-known software category that spans a wide range of functional capabilities. Specific definitions will vary from customer to customer and vendor to vendor, but most will agree that business intelligence typically refers to the challenge of providing business users with meaningful information from company data sources to help those users make better, more informed business decisions.


“Evaluating Pentaho”

This document is designed for users who may be new to open source software. It relies on a framework for evaluating open source projects published recently in InformationWeek. As a starting point, it’s worth reviewing the original article from InformationWeek, entitled How to Tell the Open Source Winners From the Losers.

“Open Source Myths…”

Professional open source BI creates a new and very different model for the selection of BI technology, with much greater customer access and control. From the perspective of competitive strategy for proprietary BI vendors, the best strategy is to discourage prospects from even considering evaluating open source BI. The whitepaper contains a list of common claims and objections that proprietary BI vendors will often raise relative to open source BI. It’s worth noting that many of these same objections were initially raised relative to Linux when customers in the operating system market sought out an alternative that could provide similar (if not superior) technology at a much lower TCO.

“Pentaho Advantages”

This whitepaper contains a listing of the advantages of using Pentaho’s Commercial Open Source BI Suite….

“Proprietary BI Consolidation”

2007 has been a year of significant consolidation in the business intelligence (BI) market. The three largest independent BI software vendors have been acquired by larger technology vendors. In April 2007, Oracle completed its acquisition of Hyperion Solutions. In October 2007, SAP announced plans to acquire Business Objects, followed in November by IBM’s announced intent to acquire Cognos. This consolidation validates the importance and value of the BI market, but also creates challenges and opportunities for organizations that are currently using or considering business intelligence software. “As the big software companies flesh out their integration plans internally, customers on the outside are left with unanswered questions about their future. It often takes years for software makers to integrate all the products they have bought -- if they manage to at all -- making it hard for customers to decide what to buy in the meantime.”