SpagoBI : a distinctive approach in open source business intelligence

Business intelligence platforms enable users to build applications that help organizations in their decisional processes. This segment of ICT market is extremely dynamic and see a strong competition between different vendors of commercial products, both pure-play vendors as Business Objects and Cognos and large application and software infrastructure vendors as Microsoft and Oracle. In the last few years however a new possibility has been opened besides that of the commercial products, because also in the OS domain some interesting solutions became popular. One of the most mature and complete of these open source solutions is SpagoBI, the Free Business Intelligence Platform proposed by OW2 Consortium and developed and supported by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, an European system integrator. Even if SpagoBI have in common with other open source business intelligence solutions a very similar stack of analytical engines, tools and components it is driven by very different business model, centred on projects and not on a license-selling approach (e.g.: a la dual-licensing). In this paper we illustrate SpagoBI's “project centric” business model and how it influences all the adopted strategies, the architectural choices an the characteristics that differentiates it from others open source business intelligence platforms.