Open Source Business Intelligence: SpagoBI

SOS Open Source has been asked to evaluate SpagoBI, an Italian open source business intelligence suite, this is an excerpt of the report. SpagoBI belongs to the SpagoWorld initiative, an effort conducted by Engineering to create a collection of open source applications enterprise ready.
[update – 25 October 2011: SpagoBI is gaining traction in Italy and abroad (see download top ten at OW2), forums are more popular, and its adoption is documented and happens also on the other side of the pond. Webinars and online documentation makes easier to try it, both project sustainability and industrialization are improved]

SpagoBI has few low-traffic public forums, the new forums collected about 850 messages in about five months and 170 registered users. The project has also some mailing-lists, and it is not enlisted among Ow2 top 10 downloads.

SpagoBI presents a stable code base, with an high mark in Maturity (over 3 years old). SpagoBI popularity is small compared with others, and there are no books available for SpagoBI.

Success stories are reported at the author site, while it is hard to find case studies from third parties.

SpagoBI is a company-led project backed by an active team of 12 developers, but external contributors have not been contributing over the last year.

SpagoBI Industrial Strength is solid. The documentation is in English, but a French translation is under way. SpagoBI is mostly written in Java and Javascript, and it is well commented. The project has in place tools (Jira) and QA procedures, normally reactions to bugs are prompt, but not always. An  online demo is available.

Commercial support and training (Italian, English and French) are available only from Engineering, but it is open to partners,  see the list of integrators. The full support is priced at 25.000 euros per year, and it includes some support for third parties open source components.

SpagoBI roadmap is available, and despite its architecture of participation is open (contributor agreement required), the project didn’t attract many contributions so far.

SpagoBI maybe an interesting proposition for buyers – as long as they don’t care about “service lock-in” – and at the same extent it could also be worth for ISVs in the IT Business Integrations solutions.

Users looking for a do-it-yourself solution should mind their steps.