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What if Business Intelligence Solutions Were Available for Free?

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Palo BI Suite 3.0 gives users a chance to try the latest open-source BI software at no cost.

 

One of the more interesting developments at the COMMON conference in Reno last week was the announcement by Key Info that its Smart i business intelligence solution was ready for general availability. The deployment of a System i-based BI solution using DB2 Web Query that is accessible by business users marks a stage in the evolution of business intelligence.

 

What vendors including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and others are competing for today is the vast market of business users who can benefit from a robust but easily accessible business intelligence solution. IBM's Cognos 8 has many new features that give business users access to vast amounts of information. The point is that businesses today can't afford to make costly mistakes, and decision-makers more than ever need up-to-the-minute information to make the right decisions affecting the bottom line.

 

Microsoft is on a tear to develop new functionality within SQL Server. Its previously announced Gemini and Madison projects are intended to give business intelligence functionality to a large number of Excel power users estimated at around 50 million.

 

With the world becoming somewhat fatigued with proprietary solutions, however, isn't it time for open-source business intelligence? What happens to those users who relied on Microsoft's development of PerformancePoint Server? Users who rely on even large software vendors may eventually be in for surprises. Unlike proprietary software development, open-source software development is not dependent upon one company. As we've seen not only in the high-tech industry, but also major icons in the American automotive landscape, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

 

One company that is getting some traction in the world of open-source business intelligence today is called Jedox, an exhibitor at the last two CeBIT shows in Germany that offers several products--some of them even free--including Palo Server, which focuses on both the analysis and planning sides of BI. Palo Server runs on Linux, UNIX, and Windows, both server and workstation, and allows administrators to create BI work groups.

 

The three things today that seem to be differentiating BI solutions are ease of use, speed, and cost. While you can't get any cheaper than free, Palo addresses the issue of speed with its leading-edge in-memory technology, the approach Microsoft is taking with Gemini, promised for release in 2010.

 

Palo Server is already finding inroads among Germany's DAX companies with some 20 percent having implemented Jedox solutions already. DYSTAR, a leading German manufacture of textile dyes was awarded a second-place prize at CeBIT this year for its reporting solution based on Palo OLAP Server and Palo Worksheet Server.

 

The company launched a project with the free Palo OLAP Server right after last year's CeBIT. Within a week, it had completed the corporation's monthly reporting using the new solution. The reporting solution then was extended and made available as a decentralized Web solution. It now relies on the Web-based system to handle monthly reporting and planning for more than 50 affiliates. The solution now includes profit-and-loss statements and balance sheets with actual data on a corporate level. While budget figures and forecasts are presented in product groups, in business units, source data originates from SAP BW/BI and from SAP's associated consolidation tool. DYSTAR proved the technical feasibility of the project using Jedox's free tools and only later invested in additional hardware, software licenses, and support.

 

Jedox just released Palo BI Suite 3.0, a complete in-memory-based corporate performance management solution that enables a single view of a corporation's data. Available in community and enterprise versions, Palo BI Suite 3.0 is now available on Amazon EC2, making it the first BI solution to fully operate in the cloud.

 

Users can demo Palo's latest release on its Web site. For a trip down open-source BI lane, users can give Palo a whirl with no upfront investment, helping them determine if open-source business intelligence is likely to be in their future.

 

Chris Smith

Chris Smith was the Senior News Editor at MC Press Online from 2007 to 2012 and was responsible for the news content on the company's Web site. Chris has been writing about the IBM midrange industry since 1992 when he signed on with Duke Communications as West Coast Editor of News 3X/400. With a bachelor's from the University of California at Berkeley, where he majored in English and minored in Journalism, and a master's in Journalism from the University of Colorado, Boulder, Chris later studied computer programming and AS/400 operations at Long Beach City College. An award-winning writer with two Maggie Awards, four business books, and a collection of poetry to his credit, Chris began his newspaper career as a reporter in northern California, later worked as night city editor for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and went on to edit a national cable television trade magazine. He was Communications Manager for McDonnell Douglas Corp. in Long Beach, Calif., before it merged with Boeing, and oversaw implementation of the company's first IBM desktop publishing system there. An editor for MC Press Online since 2007, Chris has authored some 300 articles on a broad range of topics surrounding the IBM midrange platform that have appeared in the company's eight industry-leading newsletters. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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