According to the August 2005 TDWI Report Series,

Enterprise BI Licenses Costs up to $700,000 for 1000 users, not including Training or Premium Support Services.

Cost has been a motivator to moving to Open Source Business Intelligence (OSBI). But, why are large enterprises not fast enough in Open Source BI adoption?

I believe some of the challenges to moving to OSBI by large enterprises with existing BI implementation include but not limited to:

• Investment: Large enterprises have spent millions of dollars in their current BI infrastructure as well as staff training. Would they easily throw that away?
• Resistance to Change: It is human nature to resist change. As human beings, we fear what we don’t know. There is the politics involved in moving to an OSBI solution. I have seen users and administrators become attached to how they do things and using a particular tool is part of “how we do things”.
• Changes to Operational Procedures: For BI administrators, changing tools and infrastructure means a disruption to the current and working set of operational procedures.
• View of Career Threat: I’ve seen push backs when people think their careers will be in jeopardy because they are not knowledgeable in it. In the tough job market, people get worried that their job will go away because a new software or tool is going to be deployed.

I am sure there are other challenges out there. OSBI tools have a lot to offer. For instance, OSBI tools can be used to prototype new implementation. Developing a prototype is a good way to confirm that the design and technologies used will meet the enterprise BI needs. The OSBI prototype can be extended to see data validity or to assess data cleansing needs.

There are many possibilities but many challenges as well. Each challenge has a solution. For instance, when it is viewed as a career threat, it can be repositioned to appeal to one’s love of learning and playing with new “toys”. In adopting new technologies, cost, technologies, people and culture matter. Positioning OSBI as providing value with respect to cost, technologies, people and culture will go a long way.

Are you wondering whatever happened to Sleepycat's Open Source software Berkeley DB developer database since Oracle's purchase ? It is now known as
Oracle Berkeley DB. It still has three flavors:

• Berkeley DB: A transactional storage engine for un-typed data in basic key/value data structures
• Berkeley DB Java Edition: A pure Java version of Berkeley DB optimized for the Java environment
• Berkeley DB XML: A native XML database with XQuery-based access to documents stored in containers and indexed based on their content

It is still open source. Oracle has released it under a dual license. Check out Oracle Berkeley DB site for more information.

The online article Sun and Greenplum Launch Commercial Open Source Data Warehouse Appliance for Business Intelligence by DMReview.com announced the use of Solaris 10 OS and Bizgres MPP "to deliver a turnkey appliance capable of analyzing hundreds of terabytes of business data at a better price-performance than virtually any product on the market". It sounds really neat (and we’d love to play with such an appliance ) but as I read the article, I couldn’t help but wonder if the market is ready for it. Yes, there is a lot of buzz about Open Source BI right now but are enterprises really investing on new infrastructure and technology?

There has been a lot of concerns regarding the readiness of Open Source databases for the enterprise. Does this article: Sun Jumps On Open-Source Database Bandwagon To Boost Solaris prove that the enterprise has finally embraced Open Source databases?

We [Clarise and I] met with Bernard Golden, The CEO of Navica, again. One of the topics of conversation brought together our work in Business Intelligence and Open Source. Bernard's background includes Informix and our's includes Oracle [No rivalry though] All three of us have worked on large system integration projects requiring strict data modeling and centered around the RDBMS, ETL, EAI, OLTP and OLAP tools selected to best meet the business needs. Clarise and I have worked with Jetstream [ETL & EAI], Mondrian with JPivot [OLAP].

One of the most important aspects of a BI project is the implementing the business process and best practices for the users. Determining what that really means is key to the success of such projects. Do the current business processes implement best practices for that industry, giving the organization a competitive edge, but needing better implementation from IT? Are the best practices implemented in a COTS BI suite better than the organization's current business processes? This is at the heart of most "build versus buy" decisions.

And this is one advantage that open source packages may have over buying a proprietary solution that implements the vendor's version of BI best practices for a given industry or vertical. Open Source can be more cost effectively customized to implement those processes and practices that your organization views as giving a competitive advantage.

By the way, Bernard gave us a copy of his book, Succeeding with Open Source.