Brief: It's Not Your Grandfather's Open Source BI Market Any Longer

In a dizzying 1-2-3 succession, three leading business intelligence (BI) vendors whose software and business models are to various degrees based on open source have been acquired within the last nine months: Jaspersoft by Tibco, Actuate by OpenText, and now, on February 10th Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) announced its intent to acquire Pentaho. The latest announcement confirms Forrester's long-held view that open source BI commercial models run into significant challenges as a standalone software business. However, Forrester predicts that open source BI will continue to play a significant role in the embedded BI, custom-developed BI applications, and as tools and components offered by systems integrators as project accelerators and/or client solutions that require no commercial licenses. Application development and delivery (AD&D) pros working on BI initiatives in the above categories should use recommendations provided in this report on when to consider open source versus commercial BI platforms in the light of the recent acquisitions.