October 31, 2005
(IDG News Service)
The ObjectWeb Consortium's open-source software stack now includes a business intelligence platform, the organization announced today.
Members of the nonprofit consortium have already contributed a J2EE 1.4-compliant application server, Jonas, and numerous other open-source enterprise software elements to the middleware software stack. Now Engineering Ingegneria Informatica SpA, a systems integrator in Rome, is contributing SpagoBI, a business intelligence platform built on the Spago J2EE framework.
"It's a unified business-intelligence platform, and it's now available in open-source," said Francois Letellier, deputy executive director of ObjectWeb.
Business intelligence software is used to access and analyze business data from diverse sources, presenting it through a simple interface. SpagoBI can be used to build reports and dashboards using data mining, query by example and online analytical processing techniques, all accessible over an intranet using thin clients.
"We didn't reinvent the wheel to build SpagoBI. We used the most interesting of the available open-source solutions," said Gabriele Ruffatti, architecture and consulting director of Engineering Ingegneria's research and innovation division. SpagoBI uses ObjectWeb projects such as Jonas, Spago and a Java enterprise portal, the eXo platform.
The platform can extract data from any database that complies with the Java Database Connectivity interface specification, Ruffatti said. Engineering Ingegneria has tested SpagoBI with DB2 Universal Database, Hypersonic SQL, MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL databases, and it may work with others, he said.
"Usually, our customers already have a database, so our aim is to integrate that," Ruffatti said.
There are some database applications the open-source software company hasn't hooked up with yet, including Microsoft Corp.'s SQL Server.
"Usually, people with Microsoft don't use open-source," Ruffatti said.
In addition to working with several databases, the software also works with multiple application servers. "We can run on Jonas, JBoss, WebSphere or Tomcat. We haven't tested on BEA, but I think it's possible," Ruffatti said.
It also can be integrated with proprietary business-intelligence platforms, including those from Business Objects SA and Hyperion Solutions Corp., he said.
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.
The consortium plans to release an updated version by the end of the year, adding an extract, transform and load engine to process data into different formats and integrating the Enhydra Shark workflow tool, which is also part of the ObjectWeb software stack, Ruffatti said.
SpagoBI can be downloaded from Engineering Ingegneria's Web site.