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About a year ago, I was looking to switch mobile phone carriers. At the time, I was a Sprint customer and fairly happy. The only problem was I didn’t have a signal at my house, where I made the majority of my calls. I decided to go with Verizon, who had reliable service and great customer satisfaction ratings. Plus, my wife’s work mobile was Verizon and came in crystal clear at the house.

This is a true story. When I asked the Verizon sales person why they didn’t offer nights and weekends staring at 7:00 P.M. like Sprint, he said, and I quote, “because we don’t have to. We get so many customers switching from other carriers that we don’t need to make that offer and can just about keep up with our new customers”. You just have to love the subtle arrogance. Well, you get what you pay for! I have never regretted making the decision.

Just last week, Verizon made the decision to open its network following the likes of Google, Apple and Nokia. This is great news because open systems fuel innovation in new products and services. The details have yet to be finalized, but I can really see a definite upside.

Not many people are aware that there is an open-source Business Intelligence called Pentaho. Some of the capabilities they provide are: Reporting, Analysis, Dashboards, Data Mining, Workflow and Framework. Some benefits of open-source are typically:

• Increased security – because the code is in the public view it is exposed to extreme scrutiny by hoards of developers.
• Increased reliability – through rapid bug-fixes and changes or enhancements the user asks for.
• Low overhead – low project software production cost
• Ownership – the users become the stakeholders

If you’re thinking about starting a BI project, you may want to consider [open-source] Pentaho.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 3:35 am and is filed under Analytics, BI, Tony. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.