Open Source

[Jane B]

Not sure if this is off-subject, but I'm interested in open source and I recently saw this. Jaspesoft claims to have 89,000 registered developers 89,000 registered developers. That's a lot of brain power. Has anyone used their stuff?

Red Hat invests in open-source BI vendor JasperSoft

Red Hat has invested in open-source business-intelligence vendor JasperSoft as part of a $12.5 million round of funding.

Elizabeth Montalbano (IDG News Service)
11/12/2008

Linux distributor Red Hat invested in open-source business-intelligence vendor JasperSoft on Wednesday as part of a US$12.5 million round of funding for the company.

Red Hat is not disclosing its exact investment in JasperSoft, which offers a suite of open-source business intelligence products, including JasperServer, JasperAnalysis and JasperReports. JasperSoft also has a significant number of OEM (original equipment manufacturer) partners that license its software, and it claims to be the most widely deployed business-intelligence software in the world, with more than 7 million product downloads.

In a blog post, Red Hat said it invested in JasperSoft to "support a thriving open-source ecosystem" through its Red Hat Exchange (RHX) program, which provides an online marketplace for open-source software. JasperSoft is a RHX partner.

Red Hat already has the leading Linux OS with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and has Java-based software infrastructure through its JBoss product. But it is always looking to support open-source enterprise applications to run on top of its Linux distribution.

"Our goal is to present open source solution sets that reach well beyond the OS and solve real problems for customers," the company said in the blog post, which is attributed to the RHX team at Red Hat. "Our investment and partnership in JasperSoft will help us achieve that goal by expanding the opportunities for open source software and leveraging the value inherent in all open source solutions."

Red Hat may have another motive for investing in JasperSoft: a possible acquisition down the road. The company has only ever invested in one other RHX partner, MySQL, which some observers thought would be a good acquisition target for Red Hat at one point. Red Hat competitor Sun Microsystems eventually purchased MySQL.
Red Hat would not comment on whether it was considering a purchase of JasperSoft "for obvious reasons," said Dion Cornett, Red Hat's vice president of strategic alliances, in an e-mail.

Cornett added that Red Hat decides which RHX partners to invest in "on a case-by-case basis considering a wide variety of factors."

Private equity firm Adams Street Partners is leading the round of funding for JasperSoft, and David Welsh, a partner at the firm, is joining JasperSoft's board.

JasperSoft plans to use the funding to scale up its business operations worldwide, the company said. It also will use it to enhance its products, expand globally, and build and fortify new partner relationships.

In addition to its software business, JasperSoft has an online developer collaboration forum, JasperForge, with more than 89,000 registered developers working on more than 320 Jasper-related products.

[JohnG]

Hi Jane,

i'm also interested in using open source in the analytics space.

I came across the following 'case study' on TDWI recently:

What Works: Volume 26, November 2008
Case Study: ETL Unlimited Package for Business Intelligence at Virgin Mobile

Commentary by Lionel Beaudet Technical Manager, Virgin Mobile France

Virgin Mobile France, the leading alternative mobile operator in France, leverages Talend Integration Suite to drive its business operations.

THE LEADING FRENCH MVNO

Virgin Mobile France, a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), has been offering since April 2006 a simple, innovative, and competitive offering, leveraging the Orange network. Launched in the United Kingdom by Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Mobile is also present in Australia, the United States, Canada, South Africa, and India. More than 10 million customers in the world are benefiting from its services.

OPEN SOURCE: ARCHITECTURAL CHOICE AND ECONOMIC NECESSITY

Since it began its operations, Virgin Mobile France has chosen to adopt open source technologies. “We made this decision for both economical and philosophical reasons: the MVNO business is a very specific one, and there is no turnkey solution dedicated to our activity. We had important customization needs, and we wanted to be able to modify the code easily,” explained Lionel Beaudet, technical manager at Virgin Mobile France. “Even if the open source solutions have a cost, their quality-price ratio is unbeatable. Moreover, through an access to the source code, we can keep control of our information system.”

Today the vast majority of the information system at Virgin Mobile France relies on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl) stack: Web Applications, CRM, and Back Office. MySQL constitutes the foundation of the architecture: “Our databases need to manage important data volumes; our customer base will reach 1 million subscribers in 2008 and their calls generate about 5 million invoicing tickets per day. These volumes are increasing continuously,” continued Beaudet.

THE ONLY ENTERPRISE-READY OPEN SOURCE DATA INTEGRATION SOLUTION

The solution deployed covers sales performance management, marketing management, customer service data, and financial data. Virgin Mobile France uses Talend Integration Suite to extract data from the production databases, transform this data, and integrate it in the data warehouse database. Organized according to a star schema, this database allows for efficient and fast selection and aggregation of selected data to guarantee analytical accuracy.
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With hindsight, we can affirm that Talend offers the only open source data integration solution that is really enterprise-ready.
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“Talend Integration Suite organizes data by fetching it in different production database tables and consolidating it in the data warehouse. It helps us go beyond the limits of transactional systems and offer our users high performance reporting services,” said Beaudet. “With hindsight, we can affirm that Talend offers the only open source data integration solution that is really enterprise-ready and that provides all the necessary features, the performance of a professional solution, quality technical support, and a high degree of integration with MySQL and the rest of our environment. Its appropriation is easy and fast, and it offers many customization options.”

Virgin Mobile France chose Talend Integration Suite for two main reasons. “On one hand, we benefited from high quality and very reactive support services. The implementation of the solution was performed by Logica, but we now manage it in-house, even though we sometime require support. On the other hand, the solution facilitates collaboration work and gives us the ability to work as a team on the same project, which helps us save time,” Beaudet said.

The benefits gained by Virgin Mobile France can be found in two strategic domains: first, the senior management has gained better visibility on the business, allowing them to respond quickly to changing market conditions and to define priorities. Second, the marketing team now has the information it needs to gain market share and to grow customer loyalty.

After the deployment of the last two parts of the initial project, Virgin Mobile France plans to develop further its reporting system, particularly in order to integrate new offerings and take into account the evolution of regulations. “A data warehouse project never ends, and we will continue to refine our tools in order to respond more and more accurately to the needs of our users. Versatility and ease of maintenance are also very important aspects of the integration solution,” concluded Beaudet. “Concerning that point, Talend Integration Suite also gives us full satisfaction.”
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For a free white paper on this topic, click here and choose the title “The Return on Investment of Open Source Data Integration.” For more information about Talend, click here

[Eugene Dubossarsky]

The big news in open source analytics this week is:

http://www.revolution-computing.com/

R, Weka and Pentaho

http://www.pentaho.com/

are all worth a look.

[Jane B]

I have recently come across the following quote:

If you are looking for a career where your services will be in high demand, you should find something where you provide a scarce, complementary service to something that is getting ubiquitous and cheap.

So what’s getting ubiquitous and cheap?

Data. And what is complementary to data? Analysis.

Prof. Hal Varian, UC Berkeley,
Chief Economist at Google

I found the quote in an interesting case study that talks about the "emerging practice of Magnetic, Agile, Deep (MAD) data analysis as a radical departure from traditional Enterprise Data Warehouses and Business Intelligence." I think that the research/paper is sponsored by Greenplum (but I could be wrong).

It discusses the development of MAD analytics for Fox Interactive Media, using a large installation of the Greenplum Database system. Greenplum has recently claimed a load speed of 4TB an hour by one of their customers.

I post the whole paper fyi. The original can be found here.