50 Open Source Replacements for Proprietary Business Intelligence Software.

In a recent Gartner survey, CIOs picked business intelligence and analytics as their top technology priority for 2012. The market research firm predicts that enterprises will spend more than $12 billion on business intelligence (BI), analytics and performance management software this year alone.

As the market for business intelligence solutions continues to grow, the open source community is responding with a growing number of applications designed to help companies store and analyze key business data. In fact, many of the best tools in the field are available under an open source license. And enterprises that need commercial support or other services will find many options available.

This month, we've put together a list of 50 of the top open source business intelligence tools that can replace proprietary solutions. It includes complete business intelligence platforms, data warehouses and databases, data mining and reporting tools, ERP suites with built-in BI capabilities and even spreadsheets. If we've overlooked any tools that you feel should be on the list, please feel free to note them in the comments section below.

Free BI Tools With Commercial Options

Business intelligence vendors are companies that provide data mining, data warehousing, and enterprise resource planning services. Some of the top vendors that offer free BI reporting tools and commercial services are: MicroStrategy, QlikView, Pentaho, JasperReports Library, Rapid-I, and Jedox.

Making Big Data and BI Work Together

For enterprise IT and the end-users it supports, the interplay between big data and B.I. can prove as exciting as it is frustrating.

As enterprise executives and end-users eagerly look to gain meaningful intelligence and fast time-to-insight from deep wells of rich data—enabling them to react more quickly and intelligently to market conditions, deliver better customer service, streamline internal operations, and differentiate the organization from among the competition—IT is charged with facilitating such desires for agility even as rivers of data continue to pour into the organization.

With storage costs low enough to easily and cost-effectively store vast amounts of data, many IT organizations opt to store virtually everything they can. While that satiates some of the desires demanded by end-users, it increases the pressure on the makers of B.I. tools to create offerings robust enough to make meaningful, quick, and accurate sense of all available data.