Privately-held Information Builders now claims to run on more Linux platforms than any other business intelligence vendor. Its says WebFOCUS runs on over 15 operating systems – including multiple versions of SuSE and Red Hat Inc’s Enterprise Linux flavor.
According to recent research published by IDC Linux growth on servers rose by almost 60% in early 2004.
However, many BI players still acknowledge that a mainstream market for BI-based Linux solutions is still in its infancy. But thsi has not stopped vendors from rolling out support.
According to Hal Bennett, Novell’s vice president of business development, Running BI applications on SUSE will give customers the flexibility of an open architecture, reduced TCO and better scalability.
However Red Hat and SuSE seem to the only Linux platforms wooing BI vendors at the moment.
Rival business intelligence vendor Business Objects SA currently only offers its Crystal version 10 reporting system on Red Hat. But it plans to offer its latest BusinessObjects XI platform on both Red Hat and SuSE in the first half of this year.
Cognos Inc meanwhile worked with IBM Corp last year to release a Red Hat version of its ReportNet enterprise reporting system running on IBM’s pSeries server platform. More recently, Cognos also rolled out support on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Intel platforms.
Cognos says its investigating support for SuSE as part of its Series 8 platform release later this year.
