A: Despite being an important tool to bring competitive advantage, BI is still far from being a pervasive tool in enterprise organisations. More recent research indicate that it is still in the range of 20 percent adoption.

One of the biggest reasons for the BI tools to become pervasive is their cost model. Unlimited use of the BI technology has been a costly endeavour for companies. Let’s take the example of Business Objects. They have two models: one, which says pay-per-user and the other way, is to pay the per-CPU license fee upfront. Even for the midsize and large organisations, the cost of implementing BI becomes an issue.

The second major impediment is complexity of the technology. Traditional BI technologies require a lot of time before they get streamlined into an organisation. It puts a huge onus on IT to implement these sophisticated tools even before they start using it.

In all, the cost, technology architecture and deployment – all put together - make traditional BI tools prohibitive.

Another big challenge facing the enterprises is embedding BI within other applications. Traditional tools are mostly standalone and disjointed. BI works as a separate technology and has separate interfaces within the network. That also acts as a big barrier to the adoption of this technology.

Finally, there are a few challenges from the flexibility standpoint too. Whether you would like to run the BI stack in your own data centre, or as a hosted service or in the cloud – it should be a choice with the users. But the traditional platforms are mostly inflexible on this.

A: It is true that customers have strong relationship with one of the many mega IT vendors. They can get good, attractive deals. It is a fact that licensing challenges are mostly neutralised when you are investing a lot in IBM or Oracle or any other mega vendor. But the fact is the users have to suffer on two counts when they get locked in with one vendor. First, BIT tools and solutions coming from these mega vendors may not be very comprehensive in terms of functionalities. Second, the licensing model of these mega vendors hasn’t changed much. The licensing cost of CPU or Server from these mega vendors still keeps BI out of the reach of most users. Specially when there are multiple options such as On-demand BI or open source BI, the users can get many more choices than getting gridlocked with these mega vendors.

This debate is no different from Best-of-Breed ERP versus Full-suite ERP. In BI space, there is a visible trend of users adopting best-of-breed tools and not the whole stack from the traditional vendors. Users know that the full stack from one mega vendor doesn’t address their IT needs.

The success of vendors such as QlikView, Jaspersoft and a few others underpins that statement. The Fortune 500 companies, which already have these tools in-house, are also looking for alternatives because they think their needs can only be fulfilled by the best-of-breed solutions.

A: The open source BI market is certainly growing faster than the overall BI market. The emerging open source BI vendors are causing great disruption both from the cost and technology perspective. Open source BI costs 80 percent less than a traditional BI tool, according to a recent report by researcher Gartner. That itself is catching the hearts and minds of many users in the market.

Studies also show that open source BI has greater adoption in the 'New Projects' and not replacing the existing BI tools already implemented.

A lot of successful implementation stories by midsize and large organisations have made open source BI a safe choice.

Cost will always be a motivating driver for adopting open source BI. Independent analysis proved that Jaspersoft achieved the highest growth over any platform provider in the year 2009.

The trend we see from downloads of our BI tools is that adoption is on the rise and it certainly has a correlation with our business. The number of people who come to our community to register, buy, implement and attend training tells a positive tale that community is engaging with open source BI.

A: There are a couple of ways that a user can engage with open source BI vendors. One, you Google ‘open source BI software’ and find out about the vendors. For example, we top the chart on Google (tested and verified by the interviewer). Jaspersoft is the most widely deployed open source BI tool. The number of downloads, premium documentations sold, make us the top choice. There have been times when we have seen 500,000 page views on the forums on our website.

Today, Jaspersoft has 15,000 commercial customers satisfactorily using our tools.

Usually it is pretty simple to engage with open source BI vendors. Users often don’t come back with any sort of complaints unless there is some major malfunction. It is a very elegant relationship which remains within the boundaries of getting support and adding more functionality.

A: First, open source is 80 percent less costly (five year analysis of fee). An organisation which starts small and has ambitions to grow can benefit a lot from us. We have a per-socket pricing model. The robust architecture that we offer can start with support for 100-200 users and scale to thousands of users without incurring too much additional cost unlike the traditional vendors. I agree that users may have to spend 30-40 percent more on open source BI than the traditional players because the latter have small business packages available at lower costs. But the cost jumps dramatically when they have to scale up the application unlike the open source where the cost increment is negligible.

A: This is indeed a great point. Yes, the trust for open source BIis growing among the community. When we claim we are the most widely deployed BI tool in the market, the basis is trust and nothing else. Keeping the BI tool up and running 24/7 and helping the customers with proper deployment and customisation, open source BI is growing as a choice of the enterprises. Despite having a choice of adding one more CPU for BI with their existing vendor, large BFSI, Telecom, Manufacturing organisations around the world are deploying open source BI. They find us more flexible, better to integrate and cost-effective. This is not a small testimonial of success by any means.

Time is not too far when open source will be considered as most reliable and robust BI tool in the large IT organisations.