The Death of BIG Business intelligence

[Steve Bennett]

In the second decade of the 21st century the BI platforms from the SIMO vendors (SAP, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle) are dinosaurs. A provocative statement - but bear with me. Over the past few years I've blogged about a lot on the emerging trends of information management: real-time, BIG data, agile BI, actionable performance management and the like. The one thing that they have in common is that they are all big. Either big in terms of expensive or big in terms of the changes that they require within organisations. I've tried to relate many of these trends to practical actions that (for those of us without large budgets) we can still extract value from. The context of these actions is that I have often been advising medium and large commercial businesses with existing business intelligence operations. So what I have experienced may not necessarily apply to government or small organisations. Frequently my advice has involved technologies from one or more of the BI platforms from the SIMO vendors. SIMO and cheap are not words that go together. It's not a criticism of the platforms. They are what they are but I argue that their time has past because there are now a number of alternative approaches available that leverage newer low cost products and methods. I have been increasingly looking to the benefits of open standards and web-based solutions to create low cost platforms without further investment in the SIMO vendor platforms. In the past I have used open source to extend SIMO platforms so that I didn't have to pay for the 'enterprise version' or 'additional module' that the SIMO vendors always seem to suggest when I want my platform to do something new. An example of this was to extend our web-based dashboards to include sparklines1. This type of graphic was not supported by the SIMO vendor product at the time but was easily extended using open source. It also saved the company the considerable expense of buying the enterprise dashboard for $250,000 + 20% annual support charge. Now I have questioned the idea of using the SIMO platform at all. In the above scenario I today have invested in something like Tableau which although very definitely not based on open source code, is significantly cheaper to purchase and more adaptable to a variety of data sources and presentation types. At this point, I will digress into more technical considerations. So if you become glassy-eyed at the mention of java, then it's best if you skip over the next couple of paragraphs and start reading about the example. Open standards-based initiatives make our world of data so much more open than it once was. Everyone has heard of Big Data, but there are also dozens of open initiatives such as Mondrian (or more correctly: the Pentaho Analysis Services Community Edition) - an Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) server that enables business users to analyze large quantities of data in real-time. Why do we care? Mondrian gives us an...



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Great post Steve.

It is good to see that Open Source Business Intelligence (OSBI) is finally getting the recognition it deserves, especially from someone in Australia.

As a contributor to Pentaho and Saiku I feel that Australia is still very locked into a proprietary world compared to our EU and US counterparts. Hopefully this sort of exposure can help expose OSBI as a viable alternative to businesses.

Cheers.