One of the key things that enable better understanding in a company is the use of open business intelligence platforms. What does an open BI platform do to a company’s performance? It helps devise a standardized functioning system at affordable rates.
What Exactly is an Open Business Intelligence Platform?
Open source refers to a program whose original code is designed for free access and is available for modification and redistribution to fit the user’s needs. People with coding experience can change, update and modify open-source platforms.
For a software to be classified as an open-source tool, it has to meet these criteria:
- It has a code that is publicly accessible
- It’s free to distribute
- It can be used with other softwares
- It can be modified and distributed in different formats from the original
How Open Business Intelligence Platform Enables Better Understanding
Open Business Intelligence platform can be modified to simpler forms to suit your company’s teams and goals. It helps the users to understand their roles better toward the achievement of organizational goals and objectives.
1. Enables the Organization to Influence Cloud-based Data Sources
Connecting data from various sources is challenging for an organization that works in different teams towards the same goals. However, when organizations embrace and adopt open-source BI, employees feel empowered and strive to discover and drive more ideas making their companies more competitive.
2. It Increases Flexibility and Support
Organizations have different and unique processes that suit their needs. That’s why the adoption of an open-source platform that allows the organizational developers to adjust and redesign their own codes according to their needs increases flexibility and support.
Data visualization and analytics have grown tremendously in the recent past, and sometimes organizations have their unique set of analytics formulas and functions that vendors are yet to establish.
Open source business intelligence beats the traditional BI system since companies’ developers and analysts can develop their own customized functions above the existing codes while saving time and effort.
3. Platforms can be Redesigned and Automated for Scalability
To optimize “consumerization,” organizations are inserting analytics directly into the products and internal systems. Adopting an open-source BI platform would be the best decision to make those applications successful and satisfy user needs.
Platforms that are rich in APIs are easy to automate and redesign for scalability. In addition, incorporating these systems improves analytics adoption, which contributes to the scale and performance of the platform.
When an organization has different sources of data and systems running internally and externally, the old, inflexible data management system will not work. For an organization to remain competitive in the era of All Data Enterprise, adopting open source BI will be the solution as it provides a broader scope and improves scalability.
4. Offers a Complete Set of Business Intelligence Tools
Many BI products specialize in specific areas, such as; powerful report building, dynamic dashboards, or Extract Transform and Load capabilities. On the contrary, Open Source platforms offer a complete and established business intelligence load because experienced developers constantly improve and grow the business intelligence product.
5. Encourages Teamwork
Employees’ creativity increases when empowered and given the freedom to develop new ideas to improve the business. The Open-source BI platform is flexible and can be modified to suit your employee’s teams to fuel business intelligence.
Any experienced team member can hack the code and manipulate the system to work best to achieve the organization’s goals. Teams can also be managed easily through the software as the control is within the company.
6. It is Customizable
What wins the open-source BI platform over traditional Business Intelligence is flexible and customizable to suit your organization’s specific needs. Your company’s experienced developer can tailor a software solution that fits your organization only with less money than you would pay external BI developers.
7. Regular Updates
Traditional business intelligence has a long and complex cycle upgrade and takes a long time to install new features in the product. It’s one of the significant limitations when compared to open source platforms.
However, OSBI backed by an experienced developer’s community will offer frequent updates, new features, prompt bug fixes, and other functionalities that will benefit you and grow your developer’s team to contribute to its improvement and enhancement.
Why Do Businesses Opt for Open Source BI Platform?
There are different reasons why organizations and businesses choose open source business intelligence platforms over traditional BI.
Here are the primary reasons:
- They are trying to save costs on licenses. Open-source BI is free and allows you to install it on any system in your environment. If that’s all you need, you will have saved a lot, although some businesses need other extra connectors associated with open source BI, which will require additional budgets.
- The company has heavily invested in teams of experienced software developers who can hack the code and customize the system to fit the company’s business intelligence needs.
- The Business may have policies that support open-source BI platforms, and the company can be an Open source as a whole.
- The business supports and believes software should be accessible and transparent, hence adopting open-source BI platforms.
MIBAR Can Help You with Your Open Business Intelligence Needs!
Let MIBAR help you unlock the potential hidden in your business data. Thanks to Microsoft and Power BI, the MIBAR team can transform your static business information into a rich interactive experience, delivering ad-hoc capability for even the most technophobic executive.
With power BI, MIBAR can now do in days what used to take weeks and months to achieve. So if you’re ready to leverage all the information your data is trying to tell you, we’re prepared to help you make the most of your business insights. Connect with us for a free consultation today.
You can also check out our study on five key considerations when implementing modern BI and our webinar on Business Intelligence Power BI Case Study.
