With the rapid advancement in the field of software development and mobile application, we are witnessing a rampant deployment of business intelligence suites for various business operations. These are effective in not only enhancing the profitability of the sale of the enterprise but also transform the functions digitally across departments. Some of the top adoption centers within the enterprise are Sales and Marketing, Customer Support, Email Marketing, Analytics, Revenue and Finance, HR, and IT operations. They all converge with business analytics courses taught in India where corporate training is provided to understand how these business intelligence platforms work. A very small subset of this domain, yet very powerful, is the growing market of Open Source BIs.
What is Open Source BI?
Open Source Business Intelligence is an extended arm of Business Analytics course that provides important information on how business data is used, analyzed, and leveraged for decision making processes. A majority of companies are essentially data driven and data based organizations, which means they are not only consuming data for their various processes but also producing a ton of data through their internal management information systems (MIS).
For example, first party data collected from websites, forms, and contact us panels are all used to develop Open Source BI dashboards. Internal BI teams are using Big Data / data science, analytics, predictive intelligence, and AI ML to build a dominating position in the industry.
Some of the top industry domains that successfully use OSBI are listed as below:
- Logistics, transport, and fleet management
- Video marketing, OTT and TV Advertising
- Email marketing, security, and lead generation
- IT Operations, Security Management, and Cyber threat assessment
- Financial Operations, (Fintech, Blockchain, and Crypto)
- HR and Peoples Management
- Content marketing and Social media, and so on.
For any business strategy team, it is extremely important to rely on different types of data and analytics to arrive at the desired position. When you use a business intelligence stack, it is clearly a very dominating position for any organization to leverage and move forward.
So what exactly is OBSI?
Open Source, as the name implies, is the data freely available online at various domains. These could be accessed for free by media personnel, journalists, government officials, and partners / share holders to understand and evaluate the corporate image and financial health of the company. The company’s financial results are part of Open source data. Sensitive data like employee contact details, customer profiles, and vendor information are seldom shared freely.
When free data is analyzed for competitor analysis or to perform a SWOT analysis, it usually gets fed into a business intelligence stack. Some of these we will discuss here.
TIBCO’s Jaspersoft BI Tools
Launched in 2014, TIBCO’s Jaspersoft Community BI is one of the most powerful OSBI platforms for embedded analytics. It is highly revered by top AI Business analytics teams. You can access the OBSI from TIBCO in your business analytics course to analyze various interactive reports and monitoring frameworks that can be accessed on your smartphone app!
Zoho Reports
It’s an era of self-service business analytics, don’t you agree?
Another OBSI for your business analytics course is provided by Zoho that is built for business analysts. You can access the advanced features by paying less than INR 1000 every month. Zoho Reports is a powerful OBSI tool that also connects with your existing CRM and embedded analytics solutions.
Who uses Zoho Reports?
If you want to evaluate the strength of any corporate using a business analytics course, just look at what Zoho Reports does. It provides its OSBI to CITRIX, Vimeo, Comcast, Tesla, Johnson Controls, and so on.
BIRT
I have been in the BI BA industry for the last 15 years. Seldom would you come across a finely built product for business analytics as BIRT? It expands to Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools, a super advanced BI suite from Eclipse.
If you are looking to create interactive data visualizations and reports, you can use BIRT’s open source technology. What’s more?
BIRT can also be embedded into rich client and web applications.
BIRT has many advanced Visual report designer templates for creating BIRT reports in real time.
Other popular OSBI tools include:
- KNIME
- Pentaho
- OLAP
- SpagoBI
- ReportServer
- Microsoft Power BI
- Seal Report
- RapidMiner
Before picking any free OSBI, you must also evaluate the kind of data support you get in addition to data storage, privacy, security, and resources.