More organizations embrace open source for analytics

Open source products are becoming an increasingly important part of data management, although not all categories of offerings are growing as quickly as others.

“Open source business analytics has been relatively slow to grow, compared to other open source data management capabilities,” said Donald Farmer, principal at consulting firm TreeHive Strategy.

“We have seen real traction for stream processing, data movement and of course data management in open source,” Farmer said. “One important exception has been open source data visualization, a critical component of analytics.”

For example, d3 “has been an outstanding success and as a result is supported even by analytics tools which have their own highly-developed visualization capabilities,” Farmer said.

In the area of data science, open source platforms and languages such as R, Julia, and Scala are growing rapidly as fundamental tools.

“The business analytics market has changed dramatically over the last 10 years, with self-service technologies for business users dominating over traditional IT-centered deployments,” Farmer said. “As a result, analytics tools are notably low cost—often with a freemium model—easy to deploy and supported both by vendors and very active communities.”

With Jaspersoft acquired by Tibco, Pentaho by Hitachi (now Vantara), and Revolution acquired by Microsoft, there is an interesting shift in the market, Farmer said. “The major vendors have all been acquired, and who is to replace them—if that is needed—in the truly ‘open’ open-source market?”

In the data science space, vendors have often been bypassed in favor of community projects, especially on Apache, Farmer said. “But RapidMiner, Dataiku, and Knime are still doing well.”