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Cover Story
Data Mining & Business Intelligence >> Open for Business
2/1/2007
"By not being dependent on proprietary technology,
we have more latitude when it comes to potential
vendors, which gives us greater leverage on pricing."
—Andrew Brenneman, University of Chicago Press
Compatibility is Key
After a dozen years as a satisfied Microsoft customer, Stephen and her teammates concluded that they could no longer use Microsoft SQL for their reporting needs. The latest version of SQL required use of Microsoft’s active directory (AD) system, but NU needed a solution based on a more open standard, compatible with the different kinds of systems the university supported. Administrators “couldn’t use the AD approach if we wanted to,” Stephen explains, adding that her team decided to use the iReports report writer and Jasper Intelligence server from commercial open source BI solution provider JasperSoft, for the same reason that they had originally decided to use Microsoft’s SQL server and NT: compatibility. she claims that JasperSoft allows users to connect to other applications regardless of their place in the server directory structure, unlike Microsoft’s high-end BI products.
Stephen says she asked the Microsoft people “a million times” why the company had created this lack of flexibility, and she came to think it was a marketing ploy. “I think they believed—and in many cases it’s true—that they could control their market by forcing people into the same active directory structure,” she says.
Though she and her team were slow to turn to an open source solution, she says it’s turned out to be “a joy and an awakening,” as she’s become aware of open source offerings not only in BI, but in all kinds of applications.
Stephen confides she has been surprised at the quality of the JasperSoft tools now being rolled out on campus, and singles out the company’s iReports module as a particularly strong one. “iReports is every bit as rich as Crystal Reports [www.businessobjects.com], and it generates beautiful reports,” she says. Shifting to JasperSoft has “made it possible for us to use high-end tools, and to replace the old, archaic, hand-carved drill-down reports that we had developed in-house,” she says.
Price and Flexibility
A lower price tag is another reason campus IT professionals are drawn to open source. Advocates of the approach insist the systems can give an IT department a way to start providing high-quality business intelligence tools quickly, without having to wait for a budget committee to write a $3 million check.
For years, cost concerns kept Indiana University administrators from purchasing a BI system. “It’s hard to ‘sell’ something people don’t know,” says Rebecca Gribble, manager of decision support services at IU. But since her department installed the open source Eclipse BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) system this past fall, Gribble believes she will soon build up a constituency for BI, which may make it easier to include a more established system in the budget at some point—that is, if the school even needs one; at the moment, it’s too early to tell. “We may find that it meets our BI need, period,” says Gribble. “Or, we may find that it just whets the appetite,” she adds.
But consultants and open source BI vendors cite the ability to customize the systems as another key advantage. For a campus IT shop with some in-house programming expertise, having the source code makes it possible to customize the software to meet campus business needs, rather than the reverse: revamping processes or back-burnering need in order to meet software requirements.
The University of Chicago Press (the publishing unit of the University of Chicago) is likely to become another early academic adopter of open source BI. The IT team of the UC Press is now evaluating Pentaho, a full-service BI suite and JasperSoft competitor. “We are still at the evaluation stage and it’s looking very promising,” says Matt Fisher, senior developer for business architecture. What the IT team sees in Pentaho, says Online Business Manager Andrew Brenneman, “is an ease of use and a set of objects that we could easily leverage.”
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