Open Source Weblog

Once again my colleague, Madan Sheina, has the details, but I thought it was worth highlighting some comments from JasperSoft CEO, Paul Doscher, who believes there's a pent-up demand in the market for open source as a cheaper alternative to traditional commercial BI software, particularly at the lower-end of the market.

"The open source model is not like traditional enterprise software RFPs," he said. "The beauty of this model is that it's driven by self-selection. It flows frictionlessly and takes BI into places where is hasn't gone before."

Doscher acknowledges that many companies will have already have made significant investments in the likes of Cognos and Business Objects, but stressed that JasperSoft isn't necessarily looking to replace them.

"Industry research shows that commercial BI systems are only touching 15% of the enterprise because cost of deployment, bloated functionality and architectural issues make it impractical to do so," he said. "It's the other 85% that we're going after."

It's a similar approach to that being taken by open source systems management and monitoring vendor Groundwork. "We're squarely focused on the mid-market, the customers who can only afford to window shop for something like HP OpenView,” Tony Barbagallo, VP of marketing, told me recently.

“What we offer is 80% of the functionality at 20% of the cost. We have no notions that we're going after the Fortune 500, but there's a huge group of customers who pretty much have nothing.”

As Dave Rosenberg of the Open Source Development Labs points out, it makes a lot of sense for open source vendors to go after these segments, rather than banging their head against the brick wall that can be the enterprise purchasing decision process.

While big companies are often trapped in a cycle of dealing with the same vendors over and over again, a couple of quick wins with small, fast growing rivals is often all a larger and slower company needs to start paying attention to potential alternatives.