I was at the Sun Open Source BI Summit and it was interesting to see a presentation by Mark Madsen that Open Source is taking hold due to the commoditization of software in the market. Using BI as one example that has hit the mainstream and peaked, his observation is that Open Source is spawning more rapidly as the commercial on-premise software is generally the same across BI vendors. Let me take the contrarian position. Maybe a lot of core functionality is similar, but a lot of capabilities are still very different.

BI might have reached its peak from commercial license revenue growth for many of the larger BI vendors, but for others it is still growing. The newer suppliers are increasing the number of customers, their revenue or both. As long as the majority of business users still use spreadsheets and email to analyze and collaborate for making decisions, their will be potential for market growth The technology designed for personal productivity lacks the BI sophistication needed to meet a shared and collaborative environment, let alone operate from a common platform. In practice, though IT has purchased a lot of BI technology, much of it has not reached the business users as needed.

The commodity premise is interesting, but without the software being used by more than 50% of available users, it is not a commodity by usage or by number of licenses purchase. I believe, and our research supports, the complexities of BI is what is driving new markets like open source. These complexities include: pricing affordability,; configuration after installation; lack of IT skills for successful deployment,; difficult usability of the tools; and lack of context have all hampered BI from becoming a commodity and helped accelerate the open source dimension of BI.

The reality is that BI suppliers have their own challenges to make their products work in enterprise infrastructure, while trying to ensure they get deployments to meet the masses. This is no easy feat and should not hamper these vendors from advancing their efforts, but in reality it has complicated and stalled many deployments. Many of the BI products are still too complex to get working in an efficient manner for business let alone use by business analysts.

These complexities have driven open source as one channel to get access to software to try it and at the same time contribute to the advancement of software in a new community based approach. Leveraging a large number of developers in a community enables software vendors and corporations around the world to advance the software in a more open and collaborative fashion. This enables IT organizations, consultants and software providers to take what they need to advance BI for their purposes in a modular and flexible manner.