Finally, My Master’s Thesis Finished!

Finally I finished my master’s thesis research which I was doing at KTH (Royal Institute of Technology). Hardest part was to stop improving it. Thesis is in the Business Intelligence (BI) area and entitled “Business Intelligence for Small Enterprises: An Open Source Approach”

BI market is very dynamic and has changed radically during my research period – Oracle acquired Hyperion, SAP acquired BusinessObjects, and finally IBM acquired Cognos.

Let’s get back to the thesis. Here’s an abstract:

During the last decade, Business Intelligence (BI) became inevitable technological advantage of the large enterprises which could afford to buy, implement and maintain BI solutions. These days, small size enterprises which form 98% of all enterprises in the EU have realised competitive and financial benefits of the BI. However, limited IT budgets of small companies and BI’s high TCO (total cost of ownership) may cause power gap between large and small enterprises persists to enlarge where latter will find it increasingly difficult to compete. This paper explores open source (OS) approach to BI, whether OS could be an alternative to the commercial solutions, and more important whether OS BI provides cost saving. It defines and evaluates grounds that used for comparison of OS and commercial BI solutions.

Open source were supposed to have lower TCO but…

…this chart from research shows that outsourced OS BI would cost as much as outsourced commercial BI solution (in this case Microsoft’s).

On the other hand, I found that insourcing can reduce TCO greatly. But is that case true only for OS BI? Probably no. CIO.com has an article with similar conclusion that insourcing does pay, but in their case study Microsoft’s BI tools have been used.

Nevertheless, OS BI has following advantages over commercial solutions:

• Built upon open standards: reduce proprietary vendor lock-in risk
• Availability of complete source code
• Access to latest updates and patches
• Active community (forums, mailing lists, etc.)

If you are interested, you can read and download complete thesis from below:

PS: Don’t be scared with TCO figures, they are in Swedish Kronas (SEK).