by Angela Guess
Cynthia Harvey recently wrote in Datamation, “Although business intelligence is widely seen to be an aspect of Big Data, in fact the marketplace of business intelligence tools far predates the rapidly growing Big Data market. Depending on whose history you read, the first BI tools stretch all the way back to the early 1990s, or easily about fifteen years before Big Data became part of the enterprise vernacular. So it’s no surprise that this list of BI tools is remarkably advanced – it has a long history of iteration upon which to build. For instance, one of the vendors on these pages has gained enough credence to be named a ‘Cool Vendor’ by research firm Gartner. At least two more of the products are clearly ‘top of mind’ names in the larger world of enterprise software.”
Harvey continues, “Jaspersoft boasts that it makes ‘the most flexible, cost effective and widely deployed business intelligence software in the world.’ The link above primarily discusses the commercial versions of its applications, but you can find the open source versions, including the Big Data Reporting Tool at JasperForge.org. Operating System: OS Independent… Used by more than 10,000 companies, Pentaho offers business and big data analytics tools with data mining, reporting and dashboard capabilities. See the Pentaho Community Wiki for easy access to the open source downloads. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X… The Konstanz Information Miner, or KNIME, offers user-friendly data integration, processing, analysis, and exploration. In 2010, Gartner named KNIME a ‘Cool Vendor’ in analytics, business intelligence, and performance management. In addition to the open source desktop version, several commercial versions are also available. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X.”
photo credit: Jaspersoft