Open Source Business Intelligence in the real world - MySQL Conf 09

Interesting presentation from MySQL Conf 09 on open source adoption and the use of open source Business Intelligence tools.

BI is about getting stuff out. Everything else is about getting stuff in. Transaction processing is a commodity, analysis is not. And really, the problem with most organizations (including my own current one) is being able to use their information, not capture it.

The problem is that DW and BI tools, at least commercially, are really expensive. My last company spent about $250k just getting their reporting and OLAP suite sorted (pricey BOBJE in case you were wondering). So, the business case upside for open source BI is huge.

The presentations are a bit disjointed in terms of building the story of why you should be using open source BI, but I would have preferred some real life examples (and hell, screenshots) of stuff in action. Particularly, coming from the proprietary BI tools area, would’ve been happy to see this.

I should probably point out this is the current BI strategy at AI (at least the one I’ve proposed) as we’re great data magpies but really need to get better at analysis and process-based measurement.