SpagoBI: a distinctive approach in Open Source Business Intelligence

2008 Second IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE DEST 2008) © 2008 IEEE.

SpagoBI: a distinctive approach in Open Source Business Intelligence Andrea Gioia1, Grazia Cazzin1 and Ernesto Damiani2, Member, IEEE 1

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Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, Italy, e-mail : (andrea.gioia, grazia.cazzin)@eng.it Department of Information Technology, University of Milan, Italy, e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract— Business intelligence platforms enable users to build applications that help organizations in their decisional processes. This segment of ICT market is extremely dynamic and see a strong competition between different vendors of commercial products, both pure-play vendors as Business Objects and Cognos and large application and software infrastructure vendors as Microsoft and Oracle. In the last few years however a new possibility has been opened besides that of the commercial products, because also in the OS domain some interesting solutions became popular. One of the most mature and complete of these open source solutions is SpagoBI, the Free Business Intelligence Platform proposed by OW2 Consortium and developed and supported by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, an European system integrator. Even if SpagoBI have in common with other open source business intelligence solutions a very similar stack of analytical engines, tools and components it is driven by very different business model, centred on projects and not on a license-selling approach (e.g.: a la dual-licensing). In this paper we illustrate SpagoBI's “project centric” business model and how it influences all the adopted strategies, the architectural choices an the characteristics that differentiates it from others open source business intelligence platforms.

I. STATE OF THE ART The positive trend for the Business Intelligence market and the increasing demand, attracted the product vendors that were not originally focused on this field. The pure-play vendors (Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, MicroStrategy, SAS, etc.) are now pressed from below by database vendors (Oracle, Microsoft, etc.), from above by application vendors (such as SAP, Siebel, etc.) and sideways by small vendors with attractive price points and innovative technology (with reference to the Gartner Magic Quadrant 2Q06, Applix, Arcplan, Panorama Software, ProClarity and QlikTech). This strong competition made, also through relevant acquisitions, the affirmation of several platforms with enough comparable lines of development. The BI platforms normally cover all the steps of a BI process (data modelling, data loading, analytical presentation and statistical elaboration, navigation across information, delivery, security) and all the analytical requirements (Query and reporting, OLAP analysis, Dashboard, data mining). The focus is now on integration between components (metadata management) and the ability to provide additional values as collaboration and workflow, pre-packaged business content, Office integration, real-time information, business rules, distributed query, What-if simulation and so on. Business Objects is starting to work at the inquiring

through a natural language but no one, at present, still seriously broaching the theme of ontologies. In the last few years a new possibility has been opened besides that of the commercial products, because also in the OSS some interesting solutions became popular. In addition to excellent and consolidated base products1, two important solutions which propose themselves as complete BI platforms have been launched by a couple of years: SpagoBI (http://www.spagobi.org) is a initiative of a European system integrator (i.e. Engineering Ingegneria Informatica); Pentaho (http://www.pentaho.com) is supported by a US company. Another US initiative, leaded by JasperSoft (http://www.jaspersoft.com) has got off to the same line, but at present it offers a functional covering lower than the other two. Everyone works in the Open Source at industrial level, producing high quality software, with support structures and guarantees. Related systems has been described in [1,2]. II. SPAGOBI'S BUSINESS MODEL OS Business Intelligence platforms build a wider usability context at enterprise level, also using some of the base tools already existing, but with different weights and intentionality. The adopted strategies, the architectural choices and the characteristics of the platforms however reflect very different business models. Pentaho’s model is based on the dual licensing approach, with the MPL licence for the OSS version of the product and a commercial one which add software modules, documentation and services. Pentaho proposes itself as alternative solution to market product. SpagoBI’s approach is different. It does not follow the approach of the market product with a lower price; SpagoBI adopts entirely the OSS philosophy: there is a single product version, entirely OSS, distributed under the GNU LGPL license, no “professional” or “enterprise” version upon payment of a fee. The aim is not in making money by selling a product. SpagoBI's business model is based on projects development: it is "project-centric". It is designed to realize customized applications, putting the project development at centre. This way, it enhances the project start-up with a new relationship of size, cost and quality compared to current price discrepancies of many solutions developed with proprietary products and in some cases also with licensed OS

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2008 Second IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE DEST 2008) © 2008 IEEE.

Fig.1 SpagoBI’s Architecture

solutions that are coming closer and closer to the proprietary ones in terms of prices. SpagoBI itself is realized thanks to the experience gained in the realization of enterprise level projects where the applications are mission-critical and have to guarantee functionality and high performances. The capacity of understanding the users' real needs as well as the particularity of different projects makes SpagoBI the best solution in order to face the development of a new software project. Clients can buy support services (training, subscription, start-up consultancy) if they need to, but it is just a choice. Actual revenues comes from projects and not from licences. So the main focus is on software development improvement direction rather than in marketing proposition, in collaborations with different projects and solutions instead of acquisitions, in integrations with many free, open source, and also closed solutions to achieve the most effective solution for the user, maintaining a totally free code base core, instead of closed specific add-ons. SpagoBI evolutionary road-map is designed on the basis of requirements, suggestions and features coming both from enterprise BI projects and research developments. In this way innovations included into the platform, release after release, are not imposed top-down from SpagoBI's core team to the platform's users. Innovations come instead from the community itself and only the ones that produce a real value to the community as a whole emerge breaking the barriers of the particular project, that originally proposed them for its own customization needs, evolving in the enlarged ecosystem. The community is the main driver of the platform evolution by means of projects and contributions. The platform's functionalities that are the result of an evolutionary process reflect at best the real needs of the community that have selected them and made them evolve across different projects, each ones with different objectives but with a common shared interest into the platform, its value and, more in general, in the value of the ecosystem formed

around it of which they are active members. III. SPAGOBI'S ARCHITECTURE The project centric business model, streamlined in the above paragraphs, have deeply influenced the architectural design of SpagoBI up to now. Today SpagoBI is a full OS Business Intelligence integration platform. SpagoBI is a Business Intelligence platform because it covers the whole range of the analytical needs (reporting, OLAP analysis, dashboards, data mining, free inquiry, georeferenced analysis, office documents, analytical dossiers based on a collaborative workflow, ETL) and supports developers, testers and administrator in their daily work (authorization policies, scheduler, import/export, metadata management, versioning, approval iter, workflow). SpagoBI is an integration platform because doesn’t provide a predefined and closed sets of tools, but it offers many engines (FOSS or proprietary, integrating the best solutions or developing new ones, without binding relationship) for the same analytical area, allowing the user freely to choose how compose his own platform. Based on Open Standards adoption, the integration’s goal is in providing every time the best solution, saving investments already done, providing first result quickly with a light insertion in pre-existing environments. From a functional point of view SpagoBI's architecture can be divided in three main logical layers: delivery layer, analytical layer and data-metadata layer A. Analytical Layer Components that compose the analytical layer can be divided into three main groups: analytical model, behavioural model and services group. The analytical model contains all the components required to build a good analytical solutions, which is the first goal of a Business Intelligence project. Based on a rich metadata layer, the Analytical model is composed by:

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2008 Second IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies (IEEE DEST 2008) © 2008 IEEE.

Fig.2 SpagoBI's analytical Layer

• • • • • •

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ETL/EII processes, to collect data from many sources Reports, to show structured data in a pixelperfect way OLAP analysis, to navigate through the data real-time dashboards, to monitor KPIs data mining processes, to discover hidden information geo-referenced reporting, to publish data stored in a simple data warehouse over a geographical representation free inquiry (QbE), to freely build one’s own query, export results in Excel and generate the first report template analytical dossiers, to share public and private information before a meeting (i.e. budget discussion, progress made on projects) or to archive thematic collection of documents (i.e. seasonal product’s book) office documents, to publish office documents under the behavioural model control

The behavioural model is the core of SpagoBI, the one that makes the platform usable at the enterprise level. By means of the behavioural model, administrator and developers specify for each possible end users’ role: • • • •

what analytical documents he can access how every document present itself what parameters it ask for what are the predefined subset of admitted values

how to validate the chosen value what data to show The behavioural model guarantees security and maintainability because every analytical concept (.i.e. State, Product, Department) is coded only one time with its behavioural rules, and then it is shared by every analytical engine handled by the platform, independently from its nature (FOSS or proprietary) and scope (report, OLAP, data mining, dashboard, etc). The service components group supports all analytics providing infrastructural functionalities that simplify the management of the platform as a whole. Most important service components are the scheduler, the workflow and the collaboration engine. • •

IV. CONCLUSIONS Business Intelligence open source platform share a very similar software stack but they are very different one to the other. In particular the key differentiator is the adopted business model from which all the strategies and the architectural choices depend on. In this paper we have described the project centric business model adopted by SpagoBI and how it guarantees openness not only in the licence policy but also in design, collaboration, assembling and adoption using its community as the main driver for the platform innovation. SpagoBI's community is formed mainly by customers, integrators and users that form an ecosystem in which value is produced as a result of complex interactions between a network of different agents that share a common decisional space on which everybody decides freely to par-

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ticipate and contribute. Other contributions to the community comes from Academia; SpagoBI project has an high commitment on collecting academia and research innovations. The produced value resides in the mutual enriching relationship between the different agents that compose the community and, for this reason, goes far beyond to the simple sum of the single contributes. The bigger is the community, and the network of relationships that ties together its members, and the bigger is the shared value produced. SpagoBI business model tries to facilitate the grow of this ecosystem of value made it sustainable and profitable for all the

agents involved. V. REFERENCES [1]

[2]

E. Damiani, C. Bellettini, A. Colombo, and F. Frati, “A Metamodel for Modeling and Measuring Scrum Development Process,” Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 4536, Springer Berlin, 2007, pp. 74 – 83. C. Bellettini, A. Colombo, E. Damiani, F. Fulvio, S. Oltolina, G. Ruffatti, and D. Tura, “New Trends Towards Process Modeling: Spago4Q,” Proc. 2nd International Conference on Knowledge Management in Organizations (KMO2007), 2007, pp. 219 – 222.

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