Pentaho Business Analytics: a Business Intelligence Open Source Alternative

Most organizations strive to obtain fast, interactive and insightful analytics in order to fundament the most effective and profitable decisions. They need to incorporate huge amounts of data in order to run analysis based on queries and reports with collaborative capabilities. The large variety of Business Intelligence solutions on the market makes it very difficult for organizations to select one and evaluate the impact of the selected solution to the organization. The need of a strategy to help organization chose the best solution for investment emerges. In the past, Business Intelligence (BI) market was dominated by closed source and commercial tools, but in the last years open source solutions developed everywhere. An Open Source Business Intelligence solution can be an option due to time-sensitive, sprawling requirements and tightening budgets. This paper presents a practical solution implemented in a suite of Open Source Business Intelligence products called Pentaho Business Analytics, which provides data integration, OLAP services, reporting, dashboarding, data mining and ETL capabilities. The study conducted in this paper suggests that the open source phenomenon could become a valid alternative to commercial platforms within the BI context.