Gartner predicts that the demand and development of open-source Business Intelligence tools will grow five times through 2012. The adoption of open-source tools for reporting and business intelligence is understandable as modern businesses require interactive tools for processing and analyzing data. They need dashboards, information portals and dynamic visualizations that they use to view quick overviews, drill-down information, compare data, and manipulate information.

For web developers and designers, there are a lot of opportunities to learn experiment and develop web applications and portal that use business intelligence (BI) tools. For developers who want greep new opportunities, here is a list of open source business intelligence tools that they can study and experiment with.

Free & Open Source BI Tools

SpagoBI

Supported by Engineering Group, SpagoBI is a complete open source BI solution available under GNU LGPL License. SpagoBI offers comprehensive features that can be used to develop enterprise level applications for reporting, analytics, dashboards and KPIs.

It supports OALP engine for analysis, charting controls for graphical representation of data, geographical engines for managing geographical data and several other useful features for managing/publishing documents and monitoring processes.

BIRT

Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) is an open source Eclipse-based reporting system for web applications especially those built on Java & Java EE platforms. BIRT can be used for building sophisticated reporting system using BIRT’s built-in report builder or via a runtime component that you can integrate with your application server.

Reports can access data from various data sources such as SQL databases, JDO datastores, JFire Scripting Objects, POJOs, XML and Web Services. BIRT also offer a separate charting engine for rendering graphs and charts.

Pentaho Community Edition

Pentaho is, so far, one of the leading open source BI tools. It offers full range of business intelligence tools for data integration, reporting, interactive analysis and data mining. The community edition is available as source code, continuous integration builds and released builds.

RapidMiner

RapidMiner provides powerful capabilities of data mining, reporting, business analytics and dashboard. RapidMiner Community Edition is available as an open-source solution and can be used as stand-alone application or as integrated business intelligence engine in your applications. RapidMiner can be used on almost any platform and operating system with integration with data sources like Excel, Access, Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL, Sybase, Ingres, MySQL, Postgres, SPSS, dBase, Text files etc.

Learning Resources

• If you just want to explore how a BI tool looks like, download Microsoft PowerPivot Add-in for Excel 2010 and start building your own Business Intelligence application built on Microsoft Excel.
• You may want to read these tips and best practices for using Excel as BI tool.