Even a small business generates giant quantities of data, and good open source business intelligence software will help you analyze and make sense of it all.
Business Intelligence (BI) is a phrase commonly used to mean the tools and systems that play a key role in the strategic planning process of a business. These systems allow a company to gather, store, access and analyze corporate data to aid in decision-making.
Business intelligence is designed to analyze business data to better understand an organization’s strengths and weaknesses through seeing the relationship between different data for better decision-making and optimal deployment of resources. BI software plays a key role in the strategic planning process of any business corporation.
Recommended Reading: What is Business Intelligence Software?
3 Choices for Open Source Business Intelligence Software
Even a small business generates giant quantities of data, and good open source business intelligence software will help you analyze and make sense of it all. When you have an accurate picture of where you are, you’ll see where you can go, and any of these Linux-based small business intelligence suites, reviewed on Small Business Computing, will take you there.
1. Jaspersoft BI Offers a Slick Mobile BI Interface
Jaspersoft claims to be the world’s most-used BI software. JasperReports is everywhere; this is the popular core Java-based reporting engine used in many BI suites to pull data from multiple sources, and output it into multiple formats such as Web pages, PDF, XML, spreadsheet, DOC, and ODT. Jaspersoft is available as on-premises software, and of course as a hosted cloud service (which everyone, it seems, offers these days) and as a slick mobile BI interface for viewing and building reports. There is a free community edition, and multiple professional editions with different features and support levels.
2. Spago BI is Open Source and Free of Cost
Spago is a pure open-source BI platform. All of the software is open source and free of cost, as opposed to the more common model of a limited-feature community edition, and then advanced features that cost money. Support services, custom development, and recorded training courses are available for purchase. Spago is based in Italy, and the documentation is published in French and English. The Mobile BI works in concert with Real-time BI, so that managers can track trends from any location. GeoBI builds maps showing location-based analysis of patterns and trends.
3. Pentaho Provides Multiple Ways to Highlight Data Point
Pentaho is the other big open source BI vendor. Pentaho, like Jaspersoft, has excellent dashboards and report builders for non-technical users. Pentaho incorporates a lot of nice charting features like scatterplots, geo-mapping, bubble charts, lasso filtering, heat grids, and multiple ways to highlight data points. Pentaho has some of the best built-in support for, well, everything: Hadoop clustering, all kinds of databases, cloud vendors, all kinds of middleware; it’s also very supportive of ISVs (independent service vendors), so if you are an ISV you might look at being a Pentaho integrator.
Read the complete article: 5 Best Linux Business Intelligence Suites
This article was originally published on June 05, 2012
