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Data Mining & Business Intelligence >> Open for Business

2/1/2007

By Bennett Voyles

As open source BI attracts the attention of campus IT departments, carefully weighing the pros and cons becomes vital.

Data Mining You know about the Sakai Project (open source course management system); you may even know about Kuali (open source financials). So, what’s the next wave in open source software? Today, community-source-minded developers have set their sights on business intelligence systems.

Though open source BI may still be only a rumor in most campus IT departments, some brave early adopters have begun to experiment with these applications. These pioneers say the programs often are surprisingly good, and provide much of the functionality that the big software companies promise, at licensing fees that are an order of magnitude lower, if not altogether free. Beyond the cost advantages, higher ed users of open source BI say open source programs offer them greater flexibility and control, and they are confident that these programs will keep on improving.

“My sense is that open source BI is not quite ready for prime time, but it’s getting there,” says David Wells, director of education for The Data Warehousing Institute, a sister institution of Campus Technology. “Folks like Pentaho have done some really interesting stuff. They’re almost enterprise strength.”

Options and Freedom

At first glance, the open source route might seem like a strategy that would be of interest only to minor league schools with minimal IT needs, but such large institutions as Indiana University and the University of Nebraska are very serious about open source BI, and with good reason: Open source initiatives allow their members to “share the wealth” of collective advances in development, with a great deal less effort than it would take a lone shop to develop a new module. What’s more, as the community effort expands, applications become richer and more fine-tuned as they are tested, used, and improved by a growing community—actually, a “user group” with vested interests. Then too, such initiatives can free their members from what is often seen as the vendor tyranny of escalating costs, dropped features, even dropped products and support. And open source options are not as limited as one might think, even in this nascent period.

“There is an astoundingly rich array of choices in the open source world,” remarks Amy Stephen, a data and internet specialist for the University of Nebraska. “This is not hobbyist stuff; this is absolutely amazing stuff.”

While open source software may have an “alternative,” Birkenstockish past, most higher ed users now experimenting with open source BI aren’t coming on board simply because of the anti-bigcompany animus that had fueled some of the earlier enthusiasm for what was initially termed the open source movement. Stephen, for example, says that she and her colleagues at NU actually came quite reluctantly to the decision to use open source. “We are not religious zealots here; we are simply trying to get a job done.”