Greenplum Inc, JasperSoft Corp and Kinetic Networks Inc have assembled a suite of open source BI tools as part of the Bizgres Project. The stack consists of three elements: Greenplum’s Postgres-based data warehousing platform, JasperSoft’s reporting tools (JasperReports) and Kinetic’s data integration (extract, transform and load) software.
Additionally the three companies have also developed a proof of concept application for web-based clickstream analysis from the stack which they are showcasing at OSCON.
The reporting and data integration components are included as part of Bizgres 0.7. The Bizgres community project was launched in April this year is spearheaded by Greenplum, a Californian start-up that is evolving the Postgres platform into a fully fledged data warehousing platform by adding industrial strength features like partitioning.
The three companies are effectively attempting to put together a LAMP-like open source stack for building BI applications. LAMP refers to a combination of Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database and either PHP, Perl of Python scripting language technologies that are certified to work together.
The newly formed Pentaho BI Project is aspiring towards a similar goal for BI and is stewarding the development of a cohesive set of open source reporting, OLAP, data mining and workflow components that can be rapidly configured into a comprehensive integrated BI system.
