Blog: David Loshin

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Where is Open Source BI Going?

Last year, I took a look at some open source BI tools being marketed by some promising companies, and was confounded by the "minimalist" approach to documentation and support. In one instance, a support question was directed back to the company's online forum ("Do a search, you'll find the answer."), but without any indexing or FAQ, I increasingly grew frustrated. Now, I don't consider myself a dumb guy, and have even done a bit of programming and installations in my day, so the conclusion I drew was that if I couldn't get it running relatively quickly, there might be an opportunity for the company's improvement of its documentation.

Last night, I had the opportunity to chat with my colleague Mark Madsen while hanging out at Informatica World, and this same topic came up. Apparently, my experience was not unique. I really think, though, that this is a significant problem, since open source is often used to lower the barrier to entry for introducing new ideas into certain kinds of organizations. I hope that over time, those companies trying to run businesses out of open source BI tools can emulate the Linux/Apache model and make it easy to build an open source BI solution.

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