Open Source Business Intelligence: is Nextanalytics Open Source? I doubt
Nextanalytics , a business intelligence company based in Ottawa, announced the availability of the Nextanalytics 3.0, a business analytics platform with a proprietary analytic engine and an open source tier needed to integrate it with third parties’ applications and solutions.
In a marketing move, nextanalytics claims to be open source while making source code available only partially.
Marketing claims by Domenico Sav
Reading some posts on the subject I found Ward Yaternickh, Nextanalytics founder and CEO, saying:
We’re actively soliciting a community of third-party consultants, ISVs, and sole proprietor developers to offer services and products that employ nextanalytics to do their data integration and processing. We have great technology and now, with our new open-source inspired, community-driven Web site, we have made it easy to work with nextanalytics. Now, any dev shop can distinguish themselves with our software as their analytics engine. Through this strategy, we hope to be the next MySQL, but with a focus on business analytics.
The developer zone doesn’t look community driven at the present stage, as honestly recognizes Ward who told me that the ROI to create a proper forge is still uncertain. Nextanalytics has clearly also very little to do even with new MySQL’s approach (where some add-ons could be eventually distributed as proprietary pluggable features), so I asked some clarifications.
How open source you are?
For a nominal, (interpret “fair”) annual fee, people can get some analytic functionality to improve what they use to make business decisions, and as much open source code as they need to integrate into their environments. If they can find something useful in our list of features, then the cost-benefit is obvious. If we don’t have what they need, then they have to go up-market and pay a lot more. That is why nextanalytics exists, to sell to that market.
Nextanalytics is aiming at making programmers’ lives easier, providing them with open source reference implementations and documentation to do things faster and easier. So far, so good.
Does it make them an open source company? I don’t think so.
Roberto Galoppini and 
Ward Yaternick (nextanalytics) 5:01 pm on May 5, 2008 Permalink
Thanks for taking a look at the netanalytics product line Roberto.
I think what you said is a fair assessment of where we are as of this moment and I enjoyed the cartoon.
I’ve been a programmer for 25 years and the idea of me being the marketing guy would make some former colleagues fall off their chair laughing! Oh wait, they used to do that to me all the time anyway.
**** LATE BREAKING NEWS **** Just today, I initiated a “proper” open source project at SourceForget.net complete with having to agree to all the conditions of Open Source as per their Defintions. We will be open source, then.
I guess it looks like I’m reacting, but truthfully, not really. I created the SourceForge.net project before you told me what you were going to say.
The real reason is that, over the weekend, I had a lot of email from people questioning my approach to Open Source. In responding to their questions, I learned a lot about Open Source, true Open Source :).
So that’s why I decided to open up a SourceForge.net project.
It takes a bit of time go through an approval process and then I have to get the java and c# versions uploaded. But, after that, in a few weeks, we’ll have products that are truly open source as per the broad community definition, no more wiggly-marketing words as per your cartoon :).
For the code that’s up on the Forge, I will ensure there’s enough in there to be useful to a lot of people.
I’ll ping you when I’ve done that, just in case you want to take a look at the “real” open source. Who knows, maybe you’ll want to create your first BI solution after that?
Thanks again and CIAO to all!
Roberto Galoppini 8:48 am on May 6, 2008 Permalink
Hi Ward,
I am glad me and others are helping you to form a better idea of what makes a product open source. Whenever you are ready to announce an open source release you are more than welcome, open source BI apparently is slowly catching on though.
Happy hacking!