The current state of the BI market

The current state of the BI market is similar to the state of any technology field. It can change at the drop of the hat. At the time of this writing, you can divide the major players in two categories—commercial offerings and open source offerings. Each route has its own benefits and drawbacks. Certain familiar names are associated with the commercial offerings, for example Actuate and Business Objects offers various tools aimed at different levels of business. Some of these tools are large enterprise reporting platforms that have the ability to process, analyze, and reformat large quantities of data. With commercial offerings, you get product support and years of experience. With the big guys, you often get professional services too such as consultation in developing your reports for a fee. One of the drawbacks of commercial offerings is the large price associated with them, both in terms of purchasing and running them. Some companies, in addition to the initial cost which, at times, can run up to thousands of dollars, also charge for yearly maintenance, upgrade fees, and have an additional cost of ownership that may be typically overlooked. There is also the cost of licensing. If you are building a large scale custom application, are you allowed to integrate these products into your application? If yes, then are there any restrictions? And finally, the years of engineering behind a product may leverage an obsolete methodology. Perhaps the technology behind these products is no longer viable or powerful enough to handle the demands of a growing enterprise.

Then you have your open source offerings. Currently there are three big names in the open source reporting realm—JasperReport, Pentaho, and BIRT. Two of these projects, JasperReports and BIRT, are run by commercial companies who make money doing professional services for these offerings to small scale, private projects. Again, there are a number of pros and cons associated with open source solutions. With open source, you have full access to the source code of the platform you choose. This allows you to add in functionality, embed it with in your existing applications, and actively participate in a development community that is often times very large and worldwide. There is little initial cost to open source in terms of purchasing because any open source tool is available free of charge. There are a few disadvantages too. There is typically a cost associated with finding individuals knowledgeable in open source. Sometimes open source is not very user friendly. And finally, there is often little to no support for open source products. This is not the case with large open source projects. However, with the large active development communities associated with open source projects such as Linux, Eclipse, and Mozilla/Firefox, answers to your support-related queries are only an internet search away.