01 Feb 2011
Brussels airport has replaced business intelligence (BI) systems from Oracle and IBM with an open-source solution from Pentaho.
The solution will replace reporting software from Oracle and an extraction, transformation and load tool from IBM, and is about £300,000 cheaper than comparable proprietary systems, according to the airport's operator.
The deployment followed a two-year investigation into suitable products that saw Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition tested against rival systems from IBM, SAP, Microstrategy and Information Builders.
The group said it chose Pentaho over other solutions because it was able to provide daily snapshots from its Sybase IQ data warehouse as well as consistent reporting across the company at a price far below other solutions.
The Pentaho system will provide data integration, analysis, reporting and dashboard tools. Four departments – finance, commercial, operations and ICT – will benefit from the systems "agile BI" capabilities, the airport said.
These departments will now provide daily, weekly and monthly management reporting, ad hoc analysis and dashboards, replacing Excel spreadsheets and about 200 scheduled Hyperion reports.
There will be always some Pros ( cost, flexibility to customise etc ) and Cons ( scalability and supportability)...
Having considered the above, there are definitely plenty of oppurtunities to start integrating open-source BI in big organisation based on the specific integration and BI needs. There needs to be a balanced use of open-source as well BIG vendors.
Things to consider will be like application complexity, data volumes, application criticalness for business and availibility, security etc.
Posted by: UJ 07 Feb 2011
I wonder whether support of these new open source BI solutions will ever have the level of support currently offered by partners of SAP/Oracle/IBM/Microsoft?
Partners invest large amounts of time and $$'s to build up skills around these technologies, more options may just create confusion.
I would be more interested in hearing about actual deployments of open source Bi which have been successful and tried / tested over several years.....SUPPORT is paramount!
Posted by: Lee Unthank 07 Feb 2011
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