Open Source ERP Guru

What Is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) software is a set of technologies and best practices providing insight into business activities.

The need for business intelligence is an integral part of any operational information system (e.g. ERP). Initially, reports were used to retrieve such information, but as users became more demanding and sophisticated , and the amount of enterprise data requiring analysis grew exponentially, software companies started developing stand-alone BI tools, separate from their transactional systems-ERP.

These BI tools initially included a database designed specifically to allow multi-dimensional analysis of large amounts of data (data warehouse) and tools to query and mine that warehouse. An example for such a query might be comparing year-over-year sales in a region of a specific line of products.

BI tools evolved further,improving data extraction processes from the source ERP systems,enhancing performance and user experience through graphical and web-based querying tools.

Read the rest of this entry »

The global IT industry is on a constant consolidation trend. This trend is powered by two vectors – small software companies find it next to impossible to compete against the industry leaders ,while IT MegaVendors, are always looking to broaden their product and service portfolio, usually through acquisitions.

The business software world is especially centric and the competition is fierce. Companies that have been selling technology and middleware to support the deployment of business applications are looking for new revenue streams. These companies can either develop business applications from scratch (highly unlikeable) or acquire existing business software vendors. Open source ERP solutions are perfect acquisition candidate for this strategy.

These post will discuss the possibility of an Open source ERP acquisition by large IT vendors, focusing on potentials buyers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Any news you hear about an open source projects acquisition by one of the large IT vendors brings mixed feelings. The first things you think about is the practical meanings of such a move. MySQL is such an important component of the Internet (it is storing the very words you are now reading..), that the slightest changes in the way MySQL is distributed (currently it’s a completely free,open source project) might cause a real disruption to the growth of information on the Internet.

Read the rest of this entry »