The current state of the global economy should prove to be a catalyst for more aceptance and adoption of Open Source technologies - but experience tells me that cost reductions typically drives a shift to short term thinking with respect to all projects and new endeavors.

Most simply batten down the hatches and pause or cancel al projects that were slated to add to the existing solution spectrums.

Conversely we know and hear that if there ever was a time that BI and Analytical systems and processes were required, it should be now, but most regard this as simply closing the door on the barn after the bull has left and short term thinking becomes the de facto driver for new projects - including solution expansions.

Those that are already on a 3 or 5 year strategy might see cost reductions affecting either architecture expansions or additional software purchases - but I doubt that this will cause a shift to re-evaluating tool purchases for leverage of open source or cheaper alternatives.

 

Having said that - the current situation should see many new comers to BI and Analytics look elsewhere for solutions - and hopefully this will be the impetus that open source could do with re gaining a further foothold into acknowledgement and enterprise usage.

 

On an enterprise level it might be worth keeping a b eye on http://www.infobright.com/ and http://www.kickfire.com/ - the latter being an interesting option when considering the leaps MYSql is making in scaling itself up.

 

 

 

 

 

OLAP is always under or over rated due to the prebuild and load factors - interesting to see a real time Olap endeavor http://www.aleri.com/cep/aleri-streaming-platform/aleri-live-olap

 

The XI 3.0 Scoraecard is available at http://www.biscorecard.com/ - sure you have to purchase it, but well worth the value if faced with the migration decision from previous releases versus a shift to another Enteprise tool set.

I receive many questions re the decision making process of adopting Business Objects, and cannot believe that most miss the non technical rakings of local support and vendor coverage.

 

On the subject of visualizing - here's an old link that has some interesting coverage of social and network visualization tools: