Andrea Gioia

2010-11-06T08:25:00.000-07:00

GeoBI Initiative @ fOSSa2010

The GeoBI Initiative takes part in the second edition of the fOSSa Conference, the conference aiming at reaffirming the underlying values of open source software, in the Research & Innovation and development domains. The GeoBI community participates in the Workshop session...

DAY3 - 10th of November 09:30 - "GeoBI Initiative: The open source location intelligence ecosystem" Andrea Gioia (Enginnering), Emmanuel Belo (Camptocamp)

and in the Community village where we have a dedicated table for all the 3 days of the event. If you're interested in location intelligence come to meet us. We will more than happy to answer to all your questions and show you some cool demos on SpagoBI, GeoReport and GeoMondrian.

During the first day of the conference GeoBI Initiative will be also plesed to announce a new memeber that have recently joined us. So if you are courious to know who is it, stay tuned.

2010-05-16T10:26:00.000-07:00

SpagoWorld's new Blog

Since last month the new blog of SpagoWorld is online. Memebers of SpagoWorld Inititative will post there about many different topics like open source business intelligence, open source soa, ecology of value, open quality, ecc ... In particular I will focus my posts on location intelligence topics. I will post there and after sometime I will also repost here.

Down here you can find my first post on SpagoWorld's blog about location intelligence ...

What a better place than my first post on the blog to introduce the topic I would like to talk about from now on: Location Intelligence. Location Intelligence (LI) is the capacity to organize and understand complex events through the use of geographic relationships inherent in all information.

"80% of all data stored in corporate databases has a spatial component" - Franklin, Carl and Paula Hane

This goal is achieved mainly by means of thematic maps generated combining location-related data with other business data. Thematic maps, as observed by Barbara Petchenik, are maps that tell a story about place more than merely describe where something is located in space.

"Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things" - first law of geograhy by Waldo Tobler

Now, because a picture is worth a thousand worlds, I wont try to describe in more details what a thematic map is but I will jump directly to a couple of pretty famous example of them. The first one comes from London physician John Snow. Snow’s cholera map of 1854 is the best known example of using thematic maps for analysis.

Starting with an accurate base map of a London neighborhood which included streets and pump locations, Snow mapped out the incidents of cholera death. The emerging pattern centered around one particular pump on Broad Street. At Snow’s request, the handle of the pump was removed, and new cholera cases ceased almost at once. What an incredible insight!

The second example of (early) thematic mapping comes from Charles Joseph Minard who portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in the Russian campaign of 1812.

Beginning at the Polish-Russian border, the thick band shows the size of the army at each position. The path of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time scales. Minard’s map tells a rich, coherent story with its multivariate data (six variables are plotted), far more enlightening than just a single number bouncing along over time.

The analytical power of thematic map should emerge in all its evidence from these two hand made visualization works produced far more than a century ago. Today, thanks to modern technology, spatial data is pretty much ubiquitous, easy to be found and manipulated. As consequence it has become cost effective to produce computer based high interactive thematic map. Here are some good examples of them:

1. San Francisco Crimespotting
2. The growth of Walmart across America
3. World Freedom Atlas

However, despite of the general awareness of the incredible opportunities provided by location intelligence, technological and cultural barriers still exist and slow down its wild adoption into the enterprise world. That’s quite normal when two different world like GIS and BI, that have evolved and prospered so long time one apart from the other, come together. I hope that the communities that are behind this two popular software stack can meet halfway, break down the barriers that divide them and create new wonderful technologies. I will try to give my humble contribution toward this aim talking about BI, GIS and Location Intelligence in this blog.

2010-02-20T14:24:00.000-08:00

From Ada to Barbie

Last week, Mattel announced that, as a result of a poll of fans, for Barbie’s next career, she will be a computer engineer.

Even if new Barbie's fashions has been designed by Mattel in order to be as chic as possible (very different from the one of her popular predecessor Ada Lovelace), I'm pretty sure that the results of the poll has been influenced more by the word of mouth spreded in previous month in developpers comunities than by the real wishes of young girls.

The reality infact is that only 2% of women work in FLOSS communities, against more than 25% in proprietary software. In the development field, numbers are even lower: the percentage of Open Source women developers falls down to almost 1% (European Commission FLOSSPOL 2002-2005).

Many FLOSS projects already had women's groups to try to invert this negative trend: Ubuntu Women, PHP Women, GNOME Women, DrupalChix, and many others.

SpagoWorld's projects are a nice exception in this sense with a percentage of women invloved just a little bit under 50%. SpagoBI core team, for example, is composed at this time by 10 person, 6 men and 4 women. Among them three work on developement and one is the project leader.

2010-01-26T12:06:00.000-08:00

Gartner Predicts that Open-Source Business Intelligence Tools Production Deployments Will Grow Five-Fold through 2012

Once only found in cash-strapped organisations, open-source business intelligence (BI) tools are becoming a mainstream deployment option for all kinds of BI usage, according to Gartner, Inc.

If Gartner say so it must be true. I mean, Gratner analysis are thinked for the pragmatists' market sector so just the fact that it talks about open source business intellignece (OSBI) it's a clear signal of the fact that OSBI is at the beginning of the chasm crossing process.

Of course all the estabilished BI big vendors have noticied this grow trend a while ago (at least from the beginning of 2009) and have taken their counter moves lowering the prices of their entry point products. The most impressive move in this diraction has been taken this year by MicroStrategy which have started to offer a free version of its Reporting Suite for a limited number of users/CPU. The strategy here is clear: "remove the argument of using open source BI bacause it is free software". Assuming that this strategy will reach its goal (I have some doubts about this) how can OSBI climb the adoption curve without falling in the chasm in a so competitive market? How can OSBI realistically be five-fold more deployed than it is today without one of its key differentiator that have surely driven its grow in the past? The five most popular OSBI suite named in the Gartner Report must find their way to answer to this question in order to not denay the five-fold grow forecast.

A sizable number of open-source BI projects have developed over the years, amny of which have fizzled out, but Gartner tracks five organizations more closely that have made a name for themselves: Actuate BIRT, JasperSoft, Jedox, Pentaho and SpagoBI

Actually I'm pretty much sure that most of them alredy have in mind their own answer. It emerge clearly from their market strategy. Of course the answers are different and so, by consequence, also the market strategies and in some cases even the business models are different.

I will try to describe my own humble answer in the next post :)

P.s. Gartner full report can be downloaded here

2010-01-24T07:27:00.000-08:00

My video interview on the state of location intelligence functionalities of SpagoBI is now online on youtube's ItalyMadeOpenSource Channel. The interview focuses on the power of location intelligence functionalities provided by the platform (GeoEngine mainly) and introduces some of the new development plans in this area (GeoReportEngine)

It is also available in italian here. The video and the video transcript can be downloaded from the SpagoWorld web site at this url.

2009-10-11T09:28:00.000-07:00

Linux is the hype du jour ...

...who said it in 1999? Tha answer is in the video down here.

P.s. I personally found all RH's ads a little bit gloomy

2009-09-26T09:15:00.000-07:00

The power of visualization

2009-07-07T10:38:00.000-07:00

SpagoBI @ LinusTag

Ow2 SpagoBI Linuxtag09

View more presentations from OW2.

2009-06-06T08:40:00.000-07:00

Born free... still free

This recent article of the Economist analyse the success of the opensource software in this downturn economic period. Not a so original topic for the ones that work in the opensource field but when the analysis come from the Economist could be definitely worthwhile to invest a couple of minute to read it. Two intersting points emerge from the article in my opinion:

the interst in opensource software is moving up the stack, from middleware to end-user applications (expecially groupware and BI applications as reported in a forrester survay - see previous post)
Open-source firms themselves have also become increasingly pragmatic and less distinctive. A popular approach is to sell proprietary extensions to an open-source core (open-core business model). The support model have failed. It has been unable to generate in the past years the returns expected by venture capitalists, who invested more than $3 billion in 163 open-source firms between 1997 and 2008

Here I just want to add my two cents on this analysis...
About point one nothing to say. I just hope that the trend will be confirmed in the next couple of year. About point two I agree that the support model alone is not susteinable in the long term but in my opinion aside teh open-core model (i.e. the core is open and free for all the rest you have to pay) exists also another business model that have proven to be solid and susteinable in these years: the project centric model. This business model is based on selling projects to customers not software licences. So opensource is important because cutting of licences' cost allow to incrase the revenue in project selling. This is the business model behinde opensource adoption in most of the greatest solution provider and consultancy firms around the world like IBM or SUN for example. SpagoWorld's projects, backed by Engineering Group (one of the greatest system integrator and solution provider in Italy), are driven by this business model too. Project centered business model, differently from open-core business model, ensures that projects are not only born free but also will remain free.

2009-05-02T13:40:00.000-07:00

Project Gemini: MS is going to rule BI market?

2009-05-02T13:36:00.000-07:00

Back to basics: the new MS excel-centric strategy

2009-05-02T13:33:00.000-07:00

No one is perfect, neither MS

2009-05-02T13:31:00.000-07:00

Opensource is mooving up the stack

You can find the full Forrester Report here.

2009-04-12T10:07:00.000-07:00

Business Intelligence: ... and all in the between

2009-04-12T08:17:00.000-07:00

Business Intelligence: the future

2009-04-12T08:13:00.001-07:00

Business Intelligence: the past

2009-02-28T07:47:00.000-08:00

Smile, a french solution integrator specialized in open source software, has published the 2009 version of its white peaper dedicated to open source business intelligence soluctions.

The Smile's white peaper can be freely downloaded from here

2009-02-28T07:26:00.000-08:00

The QSOS template of Open Source Business Intelligence Suites is now avalaible. QSOS is a method, designed to qualify, select and compare free and open source software in an objective, traceable and argued way (more informations on the QSOS metodology are availabel here). As you can see from the final comaparison table SpagoBI v1.9.4 scores pretty well in all analyzed areas against JasperIntelligence v3 and Pentaho v2.

2009-02-28T06:29:00.000-08:00

SpagoWorld arrives on LinkedIn with a brandnew group dedicated to the comunity. If you already have an account on LinkedIn and you are interested in SpagoWorld's projects and activities do not exitate to subscribe to this group.

2008-11-23T08:53:00.000-08:00

My custom OSBI Search engine ...

2008-10-29T15:07:00.000-07:00

Somethings that never change ;-)

2008-09-12T03:42:00.000-07:00

The first OpenDay fully dedicated to the opensource business intelligence (OSBI) organized last tuesday in Paris at La Cantine has been, in my opinion, a huge success. There were about 100 persons comming from different market sectors, all there to talk and excange opinions and experiences on OSBI. That was another confirmation that, as Gartner said, the opensource business intelligence is here to stay.

My best compliments to the organizers of that event. I hope to see soon somethings similar in Italy.

P.S. If you are intersted here you can find some very nice photos of the event made by Charly Clairmont (Altic).

2008-06-07T10:08:00.000-07:00

The video of the presentation I gave in Javapolis last year with Gael Blondelle of Petals ESB and Jérémi Joslin of Exo Platform is now on line on parley.com. To go right to the presentation titled "Leading Open Source Middleware in Action" click here.

You can also download the presentation in pdf format from the website of Javapolis clicking here or watch it online on slideshare.net clicking here. Enjoy it and join OW2 comunity :-)

2008-05-25T05:26:00.000-07:00

Open-Source DWH & BI

A nice presentation on opensource datawarehousing and business intelligence by Mark Madsen

| View | Upload your own

2008-05-24T09:42:00.000-07:00

L'open source Engineering a FORUM PA - Grazia Cazzin

2008-05-24T09:38:00.000-07:00

Le strade aperte dell'Open Source - Gabriele Ruffatti

2008-05-24T08:09:00.000-07:00

Open-source BI is here to stay

In a brandnew Gratner's report on Open-Source Business Intelligence (Who's Who in Open-Source Business Intelligence), SpagoBI is cited as one of the best-of-breed platform available right now. Good news :-) Now the question is: can be this a technology trigger for SpagoBI and for OSBI in general. I hope so. The sure thing is that, using Gratner's words, open-source BI is here to stay.

2008-05-24T07:52:00.000-07:00

SpagoBI 2.0 @ OW2 quarterly meeting

The presentation I gave in the last OW2 quarterly meeting in Grenoble on SpagoBI 2.0 is now online. It contains a lot of nice screenshoots of the new version of SpagoBI that has been released in alpha version this month on moonday 12. If you want to give a look at the presentation you can download it from the OW2 website. Otherwise if you want to see directly the new version of SpagoBI in action you can download it from OW2 forge.

2005-10-18T06:20:00.000-07:00

Ciao mondo !!!