I have been starting to really look at alternatives to the traditional BI tools. The one that most enterprise IT departments roll out to support massive amounts of data and users like Cognos, Business Objects cost plenty and take months and sometimes years to design build and implement a system. I wanted to see what was out in the market that could meet a few modest goals:
- Total cost of ownership had to be much less than the enterprise products
- Far easier to development and build out
- Have something usable in less time
- Make the user in control
I started to find out what tools are out in the market.. There are more then I suspected. After some time compiling a list I could see that they started to divide out for me into two groups; 1) Open source tools that were more like traditional tools, but at less cost (and perhaps with a lot less features), 2) data visualization products.
Open Source
This is just a small sample…
- Jaspersoft
- Pentaho
- Infobright
- Talend
- Birt
-
SpagoBI
Data Visualization and in-memory products
These products tend to be for the analytics person and/or a need that is for use on desktops.
- Tableau
- Qlikview
- Visifire
I will be taking a more in depth view of these later.