BIRT Exchange provides a community for developers of open source business intelligence and reporting tools
Actuate, a company that sells business intelligence and reporting tools software, is sponsoring an exchange for the Eclipse BIRT community where open source code can be shared and ideas exchanged among open source software developers.
The community for writing open source business intelligence and reporting tools software now has a place to meet. The BIRT Exchange, opening Monday, offers an online location for sharing code and ideas among software developers.
The site will serve the Eclipse BIRT open source community and the Eclipse Foundation, which distributes the Eclipse Public License. It will be operated by Actuate, a foundation sponsor that will also provide information about its commercial software products to enhance open source BIRT.
The BIRT Exchange will help spur further open source software development at a time of dynamic change for the business intelligence market, given revenue growth rates and a flurry of acquisitions by major software companies seeking to grow their BI business.
Business intelligence software analyzes volumes of data – sales records, for example – and helps businesses see trends and make strategic decisions. The related reporting tools software presents the results of business intelligence analysis.
“People are looking to get more value out of the data that they know exists within the company … [and] to provide more data out to people in a simplified way,” says Vijay Ramakrishnan, director of marketing for Java reporting at Actuate.
Worldwide business intelligence and tools software revenue grew to $6.25 billion in 2006, up 11.5% from 2005, according to a July report from IDC. And business intelligence is the number one IT priority for enterprise spending in 2007, up from third place in 2006 and fifth place in 2005, according to Sauagatuck Research.
Although large stand-alone business intelligence vendors such as Business Objects, SAS, Cognos and Hyperion remain the top sellers, according to IDC, industry giants are gaining on them.
Hyperion was acquired by Oracle for $3.3 billion in March, while HP acquired Knightsbridge Solutions in December 2006. Microsoft introduced Sept.19 Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, a suite of business intelligence applications built, in part, on previous acquisitions.
But just as open source operating systems like Linux can hold their own against commercial operating systems such as Windows, open source business intelligence has a place alongside those larger vendors, Ramakrishnan says.
In the two years since Actuate released its first free, open source BIRT 1.0, based on Eclipse, the number of downloads of the product has reached 1 million, he says. Also, 66% of software developers and 87% of developers at companies employing 50 or more developers, use Eclipse, according to a 2006 survey by BZ Research.
While Actuate distributes the free BIRT Open Source Report Designer, it sells a stack of commercial applications on top of that to edit and distribute reports to users, says Nobby Akiha, senior vice president of marketing. For instance, Actuate sells a visual report design tool that eliminates what he calls the “laborious” task of hand-coding the report feature.
The BIRT Exchange will also provide a link to DevX, a source of technical information, sections of code, and tutorials.
Says Ramakrishnan: “There is such a large community and they need a central place where they can share information and knowledge to their own benefit.”
