Business intelligence has emerged as an effective way to sail through the complexities of business process management and achieve higher operational efficiency. Over recent years, BI tools have gained significant traction across all major industries, quickly becoming a staple element for enterprise resource planning. After gaining mainstream acceptance across fortune 500 companies, BI software development is now making steady inroads into startups and SMBs. However, despite its increasing popularity, many small-scale companies still cling to traditional and outdated software tools for managing their core operations.
BI application development can unlock a string of benefits for startups and small-to-medium businesses all along. Nevertheless, several SMBs refrain from investing in BI applications mainly because of financial constraints. While the general perception about BI tools is cost-intensive, developing BI applications using open-source technologies could be relatively affordable from the standpoint of SMBs.
In this blog post, we delineate the most sought-after open-source software technologies for building custom BI applications. At the same time, we highlight the pros and cons of BI software development using these open-source software platforms.
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Open Source Business Intelligence
Open-source business intelligence (OSBI) has become a popular software execution strategy to introduce data-driven AI technologies in cross-industry business use cases. One of the major benefits of opting for open-source BI software development is the general-purpose software license and a freely available source code. As a result, it serves as an ideal way for small and medium businesses (SMBs) to strengthen their enterprise applications with BI tools.
Open-source BI vendors only charge for the support, documentation, customizations made to the source-code rather than selling software licenses. Alternatively, you can hire developers to build custom applications using the source code offered by various BI vendors. Either way, you only pay for the technical support and the development process rather than paying the license fee. As a result, it significantly reduces the overall project cost and delivers better ROI.
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Top Open Source BI Technologies
In the following section, we shall explore some of the most effective open-source software platforms for BI software development.
BIRT
An acronym for business intelligence and reporting tools, BIRT is an open-source suite of BI applications from the Eclipse foundation. Mainly focused on Java-based web applications, it provides advanced reporting and data intelligence capabilities for diverse business use cases. As compared to its peers, BIRT is more developer-friendly and relatively easier to learn and implement. Above all else, it offers robust community support as the platform is used by close to 3 million developers across 150+ countries.
The key distinguishing features of BIRT are as follows:
– Advanced report generator with visual customizations
– Intuitive chart designer, viewer, and chart engine
– Runtime environment for embeddable report generation
Microsoft Power BI
PowerBI is yet another software suite for BI tools brought to you by Microsoft that provides an intuitive low-code interface to build data-driven business applications. It is a simple yet powerful tool that lets you build feature-rich BI applications with minimal coding complexities. Business users from non-coding background can also leverage this platform to develop interactive business apps with custom AI features. Besides, it easily integrates with a variety of online tools like Google Analytics, SAP, and Salesforce to fetch your business data and derive maximum value from it.
Apache Superset
Apache Superset is an open-source software platform primarily used for data exploration, data visualization, and big data analytics. Being a data-centric cloud-native application, it is capable of handling enormous amounts of data at the petabyte scale. The platform supports Python-based programming and enables developers to build data-driven business applications with cross-platform compatibility. Besides, Apache Superset seamlessly integrates with all major databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and the likes.
JasperSoft BI
JasperSoft is a business intelligence software program that offers a series of community BI tools to address diverse business needs. It provides an embeddable software suite with interactive reporting capabilities and advanced analytics features to support cross-platform web and mobile applications. The JasperSoft BI suite incorporates a series of proprietary tools, each having unique features and capabilities for different business use cases. It includes a dedicated JasperSoft Reports Server, JasperSoft Reports Library, JasperSoft Studio, and Visualize.JS.
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The Bottom Line
Evidently, open-source BI software development has its perks, especially for startups and small-scale businesses that can not afford to overspend on their capital investments. Since you do not need to purchase the software license, it brings significant time and cost savings to the table. Therefore, open-source BI software development is an ideal solution for SMBs to leverage BI tools in their day-to-day operations. Not only will it enhance operational efficiency but would positively impact the overall growth of the organization. Nevertheless, it is critical to follow the right approach to extract maximum benefits from open-source business intelligence. The most effective way to leverage BI tools is to develop a custom business solution from scratch using open-source technologies.
Why Choose Oodles ERP Custom BI Software Development?
We, at Oodles, provide end-to-end BI application development services with a focus on solving complex business problems through intelligent decision-making. Our custom BI software development services enable enterprises to streamline their operations and enhance productivity through effective data warehousing, advanced analytics, and data visualization techniques. We use open-source software platforms including BIRT, JasperSoft and PowerBI to build feature-rich BI applications for varying business needs. Our development team uses the latest tech-stack and agile methodology to scrupulously address our clients’ requirements with minimal complexities involved. For more information, reach out to our team at [email protected].
