Mary Grush has invited Clarise and I me to speak at the Campus Technology 2007 conference to be held in Washington, D.C., USA. We'll be speaking on Wednesday, 2007 August 1 at 11:15am-12:15pm. In general, institutes of higher learning are only beginning to explore data warehousing and business intelligence technologies, and, in general, they don't like what they're seeing from traditional, proprietary vendors. From our initial conversations with Mary, here's our direction. We'll develop this here in the OSS Blog as much as we can. We would really appreciate any comments to help us refine our talk.

Cost Effective BI/DW Strategy

Abstract

Our strategy for reporting, data management and analysis programs and projects responds to user needs quickly without blowing the budget. Using open source software, project management, and user involvement, this strategy economically and efficiently meets campus-wide and departmental data warehouse, data mart, and business intelligence needs through dashboards, reporting, OLAP, and data mining tools. Cost effective results can be in user's hands in as little as one week.

Points to be covered

1. A framework leading to an economical strategy/BI-roadmap for data warehousing, data management or data analytics programs
2. Program, Project & Risk Management methods
3. Risk and advantages of using open Source Solutions for BI suites or DW/data mining components such as ETL/EAI/ESB, RDBMS & MDDB, meta data management, reporting, OLAP engines, multi-variate analysis (a.k.a. "slice & dice"), machine learning, portals, and dashboards
4. User involvement for determining specifications and implementing quality control
5. Costing, value and return

Take-away Points

1. Strategy and tactics should be separated with a clear iteration plan for quick, economical response to user & organizational needs
2. Agile development doesn't mean a lack of project management nor should it allow scope creep
3. Open source software has matured to the point where it can certainly be used for prototyping and even production

As we've noted in our OSBI Daily links for yesterday and today [wiki archive or lens archive], two events are showing the growing importance of open source solutions. The first is a survey being conducted by Nat Torkington. The second is the inclusion of several open source enterprise software packages in the 17th Annual Jolt Award nominations.

... "a theory and I need numbers to prove or disprove it. If you use open source, please tell me in the comments what you think are the three most important open source projects going today. I'll post my hypothesis, the numbers, and my conclusion next week."
-- Nat Torkington in Survey: Three Most Important Open Source Projects at O'Reilly Radar

The open source BI suite, Pentaho, and the open source ESB, Mule, are included in the Jolt award nominations. I've included these two, as well as the open source and SaaS collaboration and messaging suite Zimbra, as my three "picks" for Nat's survey. It's a tough choice; there are many competing and complementary projects that fit as well. Any of the open source BI solutions that we track for our OSBI research could be a top three choice. Just take a look at our linkblog or the link modules on our lens. In bringing collaboration to all, Alfresco and other ECM open source projects may have as much impact as Zimbra or open source competitors to Microsoft Exchange such as Open-Xchange Server.

Most of the choices in the close to 200 responses that Nat had received when I made this trackback are more of the infrastructure and developer tool variety. I think that open source solutions have moved well beyond that niche, and that the open source movement is ready to capitalize on the explosion in open source projects, VC funding and businesses that occurred in 2004 through 2006. This mini-bubble is contracting a bit leading to some consolidation and a lot of stability in business models and business growth, and in community definition, contribution and support. At the same time, controversy still abounds around licensing [GPLv3 and MPL+Attribution] and what commercial open source really means. But it's all good, and it all indicates that the open source movement is maturing.

What are your choices for the three most important open source projects? Get over to O'Reilly Radar and make your opinion heard.

We were contacted by Stephanie Endlich of Jedox GmbH, who suggested a better description for Palo:

"Palo is a memory based Open Source MOLAP which is able to consolidate data hierarchies in real time and which supports write-back of data. It provides a MDDB and a free Microsoft Excel add-in. For flexible integration Palo offers APIs for Java, PHP, C and .NET. From their homepage... 'Palo is an advanced data store for Microsoft Excel that allows you to handle large amounts of Excel data on a small number of worksheets. In addition, it also allows you to share Excel data real-time with your colleagues.'"

We also have the following from their website on Palo Basics.

"Palo is made for Microsoft Excel. It is a cell-based database that is multidimensional, hierarchical and memory-based. Now what does those terms mean in particular?

"Trying to do Business Intelligence, Financial Analysis, Budgeting or Planning with Microsoft Excel? Looking at Excel workbooks that are difficult to maintain because of their size? Then Palo is for you.

"Palo is an advanced data store for Microsoft Excel that allows you to handle large amounts of Excel data on a small number of worksheets. In addition, it also allows you to share Excel data real-time with your collegues. You get exciting new Excel features without loosing Excel's flexibility. Works with your existing Excel 2000/XP/2003."

Let us know what you think in comments, and we'll update our OSBI Lens' linkblog "Links to OSS OLAP Tools" description accordingly.

I recently discovered that Julian Hyde started blogging in August of 2006. Julian is the lead developer of the Mondrian open source OLAP engine, one of the first open source projects related to BI. This prompted me to publish our OPML file of Open Source Solutions blogs and news feeds [ctrl-click, two-finger-clicktap, right-click, or whatever you do to get the context menu on your machine and save that link].

We hope that you find it useful. If you know of other related blogs, please provide their feeds and URIs in the comments, and we'll update and republish the OPML.