With the exciting developments around OS and middleware going on in the open source community one of the most disappointing things for me is the poor showing of the established BI players in this space, namely Jaspersoft and Pentaho.
Even though these two vendors are competitors, they both use the Mondrian OLAP engine under the covers, with Pentaho claiming "ownership" of it and thus some sort of technical advantage over Jaspersoft. I don't see the advantage myself particularly when Jaspersoft (according to Gartner) is still placed higher in the visionary area of the BI Magic Quadrant than Pentaho. And from a personal standpoint I've used both platforms and they are equally challenging to setup with Pentaho definitely being the more confusing end-user tool.
I believe in pervasive BI - meaning that even the most technically inept business user should be able to pick up a BI tool, connect to some data (usually in an Excel spreadsheet) and create some simple reports. Is this too much to ask?
No doubt these two solutions are improving every month. But during my last deep dive I noticed that Jaspersoft still has a single XML file in which the semantic layer definitions are stored, and yes, you guessed it, any changes (such as new connection string settings, or adding a new table) requires manual editing to the XML code!
On the plus side, Pentaho has a nice demo that installs all the back-end components without any trouble and amazingly works just as described.
It's clear however, that both vendors have some serious work to do around usability, particularly in the administration area, and also need to build out their end-user functionality. Both are still tied to thick client technologies in one form or another. In this age of Web 2.0 usability this is simply unacceptable.
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Why is being tied to thick client a bad thing? I can see no advantage to having a thin client report writer tool, in fact for usability and ease of development i would prefer a thick client architecture, just for performance reasons alone.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, do any of the BI vendors have fully functional thin client report writers? Not that I know of..
As for having to edit the XML - yes this is definately bad, as is storing connection information. But the one silver lining is the fact that you can edit the source of the report in plain text if you want to. This is actually very important when the tools are so immature. (And handy when mature!)
I am from the engineering side of JasperSoft, as an architect for JasperSoft's products and open source community.
ReplyDeleteJasperSoft JasperServer (reporting and OLAP server) has a database backed repository that stores report templates, database connection information and other BI related metadata. You can edit this BI content through the Web UI or via web services.
JasperSoft does not have a semantic layer yet. Are you talking about Pentaho's?
Nobody likes editing XML files. On the reporting side, JasperReports reporting engine) has a desktop editor, iReport, which allows visual report design, testing and publication to JasperServer and also editors for OLAP metadata.
JasperSoft also provides installers with example reports and data for both open source and commercial versions.
This is Lance from Pentaho. The title of the article doesn't exactly match the content. "Real benefits or just hype" is a question that probably doesn't need to even be asked any more. Take a look at a sample of our customers, and you will see real success, at real companies, and real benefits (documented business benefits, TCO savings, etc.), including wins over, and repacements of, proprietary BI.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely not "just hype."
http://www.pentaho.com/about/customers/
As far as product feedback, we definitely haven't sent all of our engineers home or turned off our community forums. There is more work to be done, and alsmost every release we do on the BI tools side aims to lower the bar (and therefore increase the accessible user base) to take advantage of Pentaho's capabilities - adding a graphical designer, a real centralized metadata layer, and most recent a web based ad hoc reporting interface.
Every mainstream solution out there has gaps or issues (rationalization of multiple overlapping tools seems to be the most common issue given recent consolidation), but even where products have areas where they will improve, they're definitely not "just hype."
This is one of the great things about the open source model - it's meant to provide mechanisms for this kind of input. If you'd like to engage around specific features to request new ones or provide feedback on them, we'd love to have your input at community.pentaho.org.
Have you checked out Talend? I'd be interested in your analysis.
ReplyDeleteThe real problem with the open source solutions (and companies) is the pitch open source as some great benefit. Rather than presenting the ROI and strengths of their unique product capabilities, there is a fervent belief in open source as the silver bullet. A certain percentage of corporate buyers will not touch an open source product (probably about 30% of the market). These companies do themselves a disservice. For open source BI companies, they immediately eliminate 30% of their potential market. MySQL gained marketshare inspite of being an open source product. It gained a position, in fact, because it's a great product first, and BTW happens to be open source.
The BI/ETL open source companies have yet to discover how to enlarge their market opportunities.
Lance - I'd love to hear about the TCO of Pentaho.
ReplyDeleteI can be reached at adailey at MGI Research dot com
I'm working on an analysis of open source vs non-open source software -- would love to get input from Pentaho.
Thanks - Andrew
For commercial customers, open source can be scary, due to the unknowns of licensing and intellectual property issues, and how open source works. We talk about the benefits of open source to the customer, not that open source is a silver bullet.
ReplyDeleteThe price/TCO of open source is so attractive that many small to large commercial customers want to know more, and then they can understand that they can get the functionality and support they need, as well as the licensing and IP issues resolved.
JasperSoft has certainly seen the OSBI market change. A year ago, we were mostly dealing with software and SaaS vendors. Now, with more visibility and credibility for OSBI through marketing, maturing products and the consolidation of the BI vendors, we are seeing more and more end user/enterprise/commercial customers.