I am in the process of conductin research with the goal being to create a viable Business Intelligence (BI) solution based on Open Source Software. These are my findings thus far:

Most Complete Software Suites

Pentaho and SpagoBI have the most complete offerings for BI. However my experience thus far has led me to believe they are not quite ready for public use unless you are a Java developer. These are probably the products to watch for the future baring an entry from another player. These two products jave solid backing and are resuing tried and trusted components from the OSS world.

Analytical Software

Mondrian is currently the only web based OLAP server I could find. There are a few user interfaces into Mondrian and the most prominient being JPivot. This is a library of JSP tags used to create OLAP solutions based on Mondrian. OpenI is another Mondrian based application to watch.

Reporting Software

This is the one area where there is a multitude of choices. Some of the most impressive software from my first take are:

• Open Reports
• Jasper Reports
• ART
• Webcockpit
• XReporter
• Agata Reports
• ...

BI Portals

Looking at the available list of applications for Business Intelligence it made sense to me that the one way to build a viable solution would be to find a away of using some of the existing applications within one application. The way to do this is by intgrating the applications using a portal. Pentaho and SpagoBI are being built using this approach. Openreports Portal Edition is more complete than the former two mentioned. I have been impressed by the ease of installation and the ease with which new reports can be built using existing tools such as iReport.

I will keep updating this post as time goes by