Engineering Ingegneria Informatica SpA, a systems integrator in Rome, Italy, bills SpagoBI as a unified open source BI platform used for the development of BI projects in an integrated environment. It integrates query, OLAP analysis, reporting, dashboarding, data mining capabilities and QBE (query by example) capabilities accessible via a thin web client.
SpagoBI’s functionality is grounded on the Spago framework for the development of web and multi-channel applications in enterprise environments that is being developed by Ingegneria and hosted by ObjectWeb.
The non-profit ObjectWeb consortium was founded in 2002 by France Telecom, Groupe Bull and France’s National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) to develop open source software.
Its members have already contributed to the development of numerous open source middleware components including a J2EE-compliant application server called Jonas – used by Red Hat as the basis for its Red Hat Application Server.
Leveraging existing open source technologies components and not having to reinvent the wheel is key according to Gabriele Ruffatti, consulting director of Ingegneria’s research and innovation division.
She said one of the key design goals of Spago BI is to complement other components of the ObjectWeb middleware stack.
We used the most interesting of the available open-source solutions, Ruffatti, pointing to other ObjectWeb projects like Jonas, Spago, and the eXo Java enterprise portal.
Ingegneria says that SpagoBI integrates with multiple JDBC-compatible and open source database including: IBM DB2, Oracle, MySQL, and PostreSQL. The only notable absentee to this list is Microsoft SQL Server.
SpagoBI also links to multiple application servers like JBoss, IBM WebSphere, Tomcat and of course Jonas. Ruffatti said the software remains untested against BEA WebLogic, but is confident that both products will work in concert.
Ruffatti claims the system can even integrate with other commercial BI platforms from Hyperion Solutions Corp and Business Objects SA.
This means that integrators can take existing systems and replace or expand them piecemeal with open-source components. Some of our customers have proprietary products. Our idea is to move them towards a full open-source solution, Ruffatti said.
SpagoBI is available for download via the Web. An updated version with enriched base services is planned for the end of 2005. It is expected to include a visual building of queries, a search engine, features for managing private documents categories and more dashboard components.
Looking further ahead, the OpenWeb consortium is already planning an updated version of SpagoBI by the end of the year which will include an extract, transform, load (ETL) engine and integration with the Enhydra Shark workflow tool – another ObjectWeb open source project included as part of its software stack.
SpagoBI isn’t the only open source BI game in town. Pentaho is stewarding development of open source reporting, OLAP, data mining, and workflow projects which can be rapidly configured into a comprehensive integrated BI stack.
A trio of open source BI vendors – Greenplum Inc, JasperSoft Inc, and Kinetic Networks inc – are also proposing an integrated BI architecture through the Bizgres community project. The stack consists of the open source ETL from Kinetic, reporting from JasperSoft, and a Postgres data warehousing platform from Greenplum. The group has already developed proof-of-concept application for Web clickstream analysis.
