Business intelligence gives freeware response to open source

The open source software movement has created many ripples in IT, and no one can say for sure what the end story will be. When it first made strides into business markets, many wrote it off as economically unsustainable. While it is too early to say that that idea has been quashed, the emergence of OSS super-vendors such as Red Hat and SUSE indicates that a successful business model is possible.

One way in which traditional vendors are fighting back is to offer freeware: defined as ‘closed’ source software with a zero license fee. A recent example of this is the Community Edition from SeeWhy – a UK-based business intelligence (BI) vendor. SeeWhy defines itself as a vendor offering BI 2.0: this is about applying event-driven BI to business processes. The habit of tagging version numbers to areas of IT appears to be the latest fad, but SeeWhy has a point in differentiating this new application of BI.

With the advent of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the need for business process management (BPM) to provide the management layer, the stage is set for automating the detection and assessment of events, and automating appropriate responses. Event-driven architectures are at an early adopter stage but promise a number of benefits, such as greater business flexibility.

SeeWhy states that, with the current growth of information volume extrapolated into the future, the point will come when most information will need to be processed by machines without humans ever seeing it.

Although the concept of freeware is not new (it has been popular for decades at the low-end of the consumer market), the rise of freeware community editions from business players can be seen as a response to open source software (OSS). With the hugely popular OSS Eclipse platform providing a BI solution in the BI and Reporting Tools project (BIRT), now in release 2.1.1, the pressure has been growing on BI vendors.

In addition, Microsoft bundles a number of BI tools with its database SQL Server. Therefore, the combined forces of Microsoft and OSS are squeezing the traditional BI market.

Thus, SeeWhy offers freeware as an enticement to try its product; the downmarket connotations of freeware are no longer a barrier for business. The label of ‘Community Edition’ creates a mental association with the communities that support OSS, although how much of a community actually exists will vary across vendors. Some will nurture a genuine user community with facilities for the sharing of models, libraries, and applications – but even for those that do not, the concept of freeware shares one important attribute with OSS: it allows users to try the application and see how useful it is before making a commitment.

Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)

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