At this time of year, everyone comes out with their predictions or trends for the following year. What do they think will shake the market in the new year? This year (and perhaps last, as well), there is a common trend of pundits predicting that this will be the year when open source BI makes its impact.
While I see a lot of press releases, email blasts, and articles
about open source BI, that doesn’t mean that they are moving ahead of
traditional BI. Tools, such as Pentaho or JasperSoft, may see some growth in lower markets and at
departmental levels. This growth, however, will occur mostly among new BI or Excel users and not at the expense of SAP or IBM.
I don’t see many enterprise level BI directors
willing to stake their reputations on Open source tools in their customer
facing applications. Most IT managers build their careers using certain
technologies, so they become evangelists for those vendors, i.e. MS, ORCL, and
IBM. Every now and then, something new comes along and gains a fair number
of champions, such as Netezza. But it’s a long road to seriously challenging the
big 4 (add SAP). It is likely the smaller company will get bought by a larger one before they
ever get there.
The market for open source BI will remain limited for the next 5 to 10 years. If we see any growth, it will be on the back end, ala Linux and Apache. Maybe open source has a better chance with ETL, ESB, and DB, but even then I don’t expect widespread adoption. The only reason Linux has made the advancement it has is that Windows still is not reliable enough for critical apps. Linux is really just the next generation of Unix.
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