The GPL is the most widely used open source software license. Currently, more than 60% of open source projects tracked on freshmeat.org are GPL-licensed. The GPL is well understood by the market and the legal community and has notable precedents such as MySQL, Java and the Linux kernel as GPL licensed projects. Because the GPL is what’s known as a “reciprocal license” it ensures that the software is open and remains open.

“Many companies hoping to compete on the strength of their data are running into hurdles because they can’t provide enough people access to all the data they need to execute more effectively,” said David Stodder, vice president and research director at industry analyst firm Ventana Research. “Companies should evaluate integrated solutions like the one stemming from the Pentaho-Vertica partnership, which could enable companies to affordably equip more workers with state-of-the-art BI software and give them faster ad-hoc access to larger amounts of historical and real-time data so they can innovate sooner and better than competitors.”

This partnership gives companies a blueprint for extending comprehensive data analysis throughout the enterprise. Connecting easy-to-use BI tools on employees’ desktops with high-performance database management systems sets the stage for self-service analytics. As more employees become empowered to make critical business decisions, a company can gain a market advantage by capitalizing more quickly on business opportunities. Moreover, the simplicity of this solution enables IT staff to spend less time on setup and tuning, and more time delivering invaluable information in the form of dashboards and reports to a wider audience.

“BI tools and database management systems deliver the best business results if they’re accessible to a broad group of employees,” said Richard Daley, founder and CEO of Pentaho. “Making more data available to more people faster and more conveniently helps companies be more agile and competitive, which is paramount to success today and is the promise of this partnership.”

The Vertica® Analytic Database delivers query results 50 to 200 times faster than other databases. Vertica’s RDBMS enables business people to make complex, ad hoc queries on the fly and affordably. Vertica also allows mixed workloads because users can continue making queries while data is loaded into the system, eliminating the wait and sluggish performance many databases experience during loading. Breakthrough data compression allows the Vertica Database to reduce storage requirements by as much as 90 percent, dramatically cutting hardware overhead and energy consumption so that customers can analyze larger amounts of historical data at a fraction of the cost.

The Pentaho Open BI suite provides a comprehensive BI platform for reporting, analysis, dashboards, data mining, and data integration. Pentaho’s platform consists of four key elements: Pentaho Analysis, based on Pentaho’s popular Mondrian open source online analytical processing (OLAP) server, lets users pose questions in business terms; Pentaho Reporting lets users create, generate and distribute rich and sophisticated report content from all sources of information; Pentaho Data Integration, based on Pentaho’s Kettle data integration project, uses extract, transform and load (ETL) technology to gather data from multiple sources and integrate it for faster, easier access and analysis; and Weka machine-learning software simplifies data mining.

The Vertica Analytic Database integrates with the entire Pentaho suite to enable companies to optimize storage space and complex/ad hoc query speed within a comprehensive BI platform. “This partnership delivers on the largely unrealized potential of BI technology by making it usable, affordable and critical to business success,” said Ralph Breslauer, CEO of Vertica. “With this integration, companies can not only learn more about their customers and their markets, but they can also access that information quickly and immediately capitalize on it to gain a competitive advantage.”

Palo Server facilitates high speed by keeping processed data in memory (In-Memory OLAP). Queries for base and also aggregated data cells take place in real-time and provide results quickly. With that, Palo Server provides a great contrast to popular multidimensional databases, which are based on relational technologies (ROLAP). Further, in-memory planning – both top/down as well as bottom/up – is supported by the functionality to write-back data into the cubes.

“Speed is one of the most frequently mentioned BI application requirements and, interestingly enough, is among its top points of criticism. Data queries that take longer than two to three seconds are no longer acceptable to most users. This threshold is not exceeded by Palo Server 2.0; data query results are generally displayed within milliseconds”, Kristian Raue, CEO of Jedox GmbH, explains.

Palo Server 2.0 is particularly suitable as the data engine for Microsoft Excel. Palo extends Excel by the missing back-end technology and thereby standardizes the data basis of Excel applications distributed throughout the corporation. The multi-dimensional data server centrally maintains any number of spreadsheet cells, which may be spread across several data cubes. The resulting Enterprise Spreadsheets ensure consolidation, control and distribution of the Excel data, while users continue to benefit from Excel’s advantages. The Worksheet Server technology offered by Jedox allows for Palo data to be queried and entered via the Web.

Version 2.0 enables data- and structure-driven analyses of corporate figures, e.g. ABC and Top/Down Analyses. Such instruments, adjustable to meet individual requirements, are a great tool for users to conduct specific situational and planning analyses. The resulting figures facilitate executives in their business decision-making.

The open API provided by Jedox facilitates the development of interfaces that connect Palo Server with other applications.

The Jedox team provides consulting and support services to their clients to assist them in implementing Palo Server 2.0 quickly and enable them to fully utilize the server’s flexible application capabilities.

This global survey focused on the following key areas concerning Open Source software: awareness and adoption levels; benefits and barriers to adoption; adoption influences and Open Source Business Intelligence (BI). More than six hundred IT and business professionals from financial services and other industries provided detailed data showing enhanced awareness and adoption of Open Source software. The results indicate that 42.9 percent of respondents are already using Open Source, 23.6 percent are currently using Open Source BI and 31.2 percent are likely or very likely to consider using Open Source BI solutions.

“These survey results show that Open Source software is moving into the mainstream and that Open Source is rising in influence,” said Mark Madsen, president of Third Nature and faculty at The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI). “Half the organizations surveyed stated that Open Source is either the preferred option or is explicitly considered in the software procurement process. One surprising note is that one-third of the organizations surveyed are now likely to consider Open Source business intelligence in their evaluations. This is a huge shift from just a few years ago.”

• 2007 Survey Highlights – Financial Services in North America, Germany and U.K.
  • A total of 192 responses were collected from IT and business professionals working in financial services.
  • Among responses in financial services, 49.0% are already using Open Source software and 29.8% are already using Open Source BI.
  • The key benefit cited for Open Source software is that there are no licensing fees (60.6%).
  • Other significant benefits include: vendor independence (48.4%), flexibility (45.7%), access to source code (44.7%), software that is built on open platforms (38.8%), freedom from Microsoft environment (35.6%) and standards-based technology (34.0%).
  • Over half of the respondents (50.5%) chose Open Source software as either the preferred option or a specific consideration when procuring software. While a further 37.0% say that it is not a factor in procurement, only 12.5%have a policy of not using Open Source software.
  • Additionally, 29.8% of participants are already using Open Source BI, 32.3% would likely or very likely consider an Open Source BI tool and 18.2%were familiar or very familiar with the BIRT project.
  • The barriers to adoption perceived by participants in implementing Open Source technologies are the lack of availability of long term support (52.7%) and maintenance (48.9%). Others included: absence of in-house skills to implement (38.3%), incompatibility with existing applications (35.1%), no proven track record in real world applications (30.9%) and the inability to provide indemnification (30.3%).

• 2007 Highlights from North America
  • A total of 390 senior personnel in the United States and Canada participated in this online survey, conducted in May 2007.
  • In North America almost half of the respondents (47.7%) are either using or planning to use Open Source software with 10.5% currently evaluating implementation; 29% are already using open source BI and 36.8% would likely or very likely consider using it.
  • The proportion of North American respondents who observe that the benefits of Open Source software outweigh the inhibitors (51.9%) is five times as high as the proportion of respondents who view otherwise was (10.5%).
• 2007 Highlights from United Kingdom
  • A total of 117 senior personnel in the United Kingdom participated in this online survey in May 2007.
  • The financial services sector respondents represent large and medium Financial Services companies across the banking and insurance sectors. Almost a quarter (22.9%) describe their organization’s level of familiarity with Open Source software as “high,” with a further 47.9% rating it as “moderate.”
  • The proportion of financial services respondents using Open Source software is at 45.8%; 27.3% are already using Open Source BI.
• 2007 Highlights from Germany
  • A total of 95 senior personnel in Germany participated in this online survey in May 2007.
  • Overall, Germany records the highest percentage of respondents already using and/or familiar with Open Source software (65.2% with level of high or moderate familiarity). This is believed to have many contributing factors which will be explored further in the full report.

“This year’s survey has yielded a tremendous response with more than 600 senior business and IT professionals taking the time to give us a unique snapshot of their views and insights into Open Source software adoption trends, especially in the BI market,” said Nobby Akiha, senior vice president of Marketing at Actuate. “The survey results illustrate that there is increased demand for Open Source. The results also help us set our strategic direction to meet the demands of our customers and to assist organizations with their current business challenges.”

JasperForge.org is an online developer site that provides free access to software and tools to build, deploy, and extend open source BI software. Projects range from developer tools to integration toolkits to localization powered by an interactive online translation tool, JasperBabylon, where more than 30 different translation projects are underway. Some of the more popular JasperForge.org projects include the Drupal Bridge for JasperReports, iReport with Hibernate, Oracle Stored Procedures, Reporting and OLAP Analysis Tools for Bugzilla, and Jasper4Eclipse, an iReport plug-in project for eclipse.

“The rapid growth of JasperForge.org shows that open source BI provides unique value that goes beyond what proprietary BI solutions can deliver,” said Tim Cloonan, director of community relations at JasperSoft. “In JasperForge.org, we see both commercial businesses and independent community developers taking advantage of our free project hosting services to build solutions for their specific problems. The solutions are rapidly built with community support without having to wait for large proprietary software companies to understand and evaluate how to best address the needs of both groups.”

Reflecting the breadth and range of the Jasper community are projects from Cincom, a large software and services company, and John Bindel, a software developer who independently developed better file virtualization capabilities for JasperReports.

Cincom, a privately held software and services company based in Cincinnati, Ohio, with annual revenues exceeding $150 million, joined the open source BI community on JasperForge.org in order to increase the value of BI and reporting software they offer to their customer base.

Cincom developed extensions to JasperSoft products to increase the capabilities of its products that access mainframe data. Cincom integrated the waRehouse Explorer tool with the iReport IDE to enable querying multidimensional data sources. They also helped with the implementation of the XMLA protocol and support of PostgeSQL for JasperAnalysis.

“JasperSoft encourages cooperative business development to extend JasperSoft products for specific needs,” said Jeff Gunderson, engineering manager for database products at Cincom. “The collaborative environment at JasperForge.org combined with the strong open source community cooperation at JasperSoft enabled us to contribute code to projects to give us support for data sources and databases that met our specific requirements.”

John Bindel, a software developer for Works Inc., which is now part of Bank of America, contributed to the open source BI community at JasperForge in order to increase the scalability of the JasperReports library.

Bindel started development work when he noticed limitations on very large report size during an evaluation of JasperReports. Bindel’s work with file virtualization and in-memory compression enables very large reports to be created rapidly with JasperReports. Thanks to Bindel, the reports generated in the Adobe PDF format are now limited only by the amount of disk space available.

“JasperReports is a great example of what open source development can produce — a high-performance reporting library that can effectively compete in functionality with more expensive proprietary offerings,” said Bindel. “When I started to work with the project lead, Teodor Danciu, JasperReports could already generate PDF files quite well, but I saw that it could benefit from support for arbitrarily large files. I wrote a multiple file virtualizer as part of my evaluation and later added the GZip compression virtualizer. Freely giving my work back to the community was absolutely the natural and proper thing for me to do.”

The rapid success of JasperForge.org is an outgrowth of JasperSoft’s pioneering work in applying a commercial open source business model to BI solutions. By nurturing the growth of a wide range of freely-available open source BI projects, JasperSoft increases the value of its JasperSoft BI Suite. Thanks to the community, more than two million copies of JasperSoft’s core BI products have been downloaded. This has enabled the development of a robust business in offering commercial products and services that bring increased value to customers looking for enterprise-class product features, support, and certification.

ALTANA Pharma Deutschland GmbH utilise Palo (www.palo.net) for their “Selling Excellence Program”. Palo, an Open Source database developed by the Jedox (www.jedox.com), is used as a centrally accessible data storage in an application which, based on Key Performance Indicators, depicts and analyses sales performance and trends for 36 sales regions with more than 400 sales districts.

In order to achieve this, Altana elaborated a catalogue of KPIs based on the “European Best Practice Approach”. These KPIs now serve as measurement categories for success and competitiveness. The scorecards, which are based on these KPIs, not only show quantitative measures but also visualise current trends in dynamically generated arrow charts. All scorecard data are held centrally in the multidimensional data model of the Palo server. Scorecards were rolled out to the field sales reps with the help of Worksheet-Server, an Excel-to-Web solution also offered by Jedox. Data are thus accessible for evaluation to all authorised team members through both Excel and a web browser.

“With Palo & Worksheet-Server, we have managed for the first time a system rollout during which User-Trainings and the information content, but not the technique were the main subject. With a small but efficient team of specialists plus Jedox, this project was realised in a uniquely short time”, says Gerhard Klingele, Director Finance and Controlling at ALTANA Pharma Deutschland GmbH.

Further information about this project is available on Jedox’s home page www.jedox.com, together with information on the whole range of solutions offered in the field of business analysis and planning.