Open Source BI – 3 years later
3-4 years ago BI was the top priority for CIOs of almost all medium/large enterprises while small companies couldn’t catch up due to massive costs.
So I did research in order find out whether Open Source BI actually saves money and facilitates BI rollout in small companies. The answer was – “not quite”. It turned out that the major part of the cost is implementation. With affordable commercial BI solutions like Microsoft BI, cost of the software is miniature in comparison to the implementation costs. Another finding was that implementation using internal resources is actually cheaper than using 3rd parties.
Recently I have got an opportunity to check current situation. Pentaho London User Group (PLUG) meetup which took place last week had more than 40 participants. It was surprising to see so much interest in Open Source BI so I decided to conduct a small survey. After quick chat with Tom (one of the PLUG founders) we came up with the following questions (original questionnaire can be downloaded here):
- What is the size of your company?
- Do you currently use BI in your company?
- Type of BI tools (Open Source, Commercial, etc)?
- Who worked on BI implementation?
- Any plans for BI with Big Data?
- Which BI functionalities are used (Reporting, ETL, etc.)?
Before going to the results, I have to mention that it was Pentaho meetup and one of the speakers – Matt Casters (PDI lead) was giving a talk on integration with Hadoop. This is to say that the audience was mostly people who were interested in those two things – Pentaho and Hadoop integration.
We’ve got about 50% response rate and here are interesting findings:
- 53% was from medium and large companies vs. 47% from small companies. This shows growing interest to Open Source BI among medium and large companies who were traditionally with commercial vendors.
- 89% of medium/large companies already using BI vs. only 29% of small companies. This clearly shows that small companies are still behind in adoption speed. Costs?
- 60% of those use have BI are using Open Source Community Edition and 50% Enterprise Edition. Many of those are using both CE and EE. It’s interesting to see that people who pay for EE are also using CE in parallel.
- No one actually using cloud based BI and only 1 person said they are interested in using it. Even though there are now companies like GoodData, Cloud based BI (or SaaS BI) hasn’t really took off yet.
- My favourite one: 100% of interviewees said that they used internal resources to implement BI! 28% of those also used IT Consulting companies and/or BI vendor to help them. This clearly shows how BI has changed over the years. 5 years ago, when BI was relatively new, almost all companies had to turn to the 3rd parties simply because there were no experts. Nowadays, companies prefer to hire BI experts and let them implement and maintain BI and save some money.
If you are interested, you can download raw survey results from here. All PLUG speeches can be found at the SkillMatter website.
I also compiled following infographic which reflects major findings:
My favourite one: 100% of interviewees said that they used internal resources to implement BI! 28% of those also used IT Consulting companies and/or BI vendor to help them. This clearly shows how BI has changed over the years. 5 years ago, when BI was relatively new, almost all companies had to turn to the 3rd parties simply because there were no experts. Nowadays, companies prefer to hire BI experts and let them implement and maintain BI and save some money.