Background

The client is a large Irish public sector body, who is seen to be at the forefront of IT strategy and thought leadership, not only in Ireland but worldwide. The client needed to replace an aging reporting tool with one that could cope with an increasing and constant business need for timely, accurate data, while at the same time dramatically reducing costs.

Our BI Team was selected to deliver the project because of previous experience in enterprise BI programs with new BI technologies, and also because the team is highly skilled, experienced and has a track record for delivering BI, data warehousing, and reporting solutions. 

Solution

In line with the client's clear open source strategy, and fter evaluating a number of open source BI platforms, we decided on JasperReports Server. We selected one discrete business process to deliver an end-to-end solution using JasperReports Server to demonstrate the software’s suitability. This pilot phase delivered an Ingres open source data warehouse, Jaspersoft ETL, and JasperReports Server as the open source BI application server.

This pilot proved that open source BI was a viable option and that the delivery of JasperReports Server was comparable to that of Tier 1 software options. Over the course of this three-month project, we provided an analysis of requirement, the technology solution design along with relevant documentation, and a list of requirements to develop an open source BI competency centre to delivery the technology throughout the organisation.

Benefits

This first full production open source BI project undertaken by a public sector body in Ireland took just nine months to deliver and has proved extremely beneficial since its launch in January 2010. 

• The client has found that the solution can be extended and customised to meet all of its business requirements and it has not been constrained in its desire to employ the full functionality of the software by the need to use costly vendor consultants.
• The client is now engaged in rolling out the Jaspersoft-based solution to all areas of its business and is delighted that its innovative stance of being the only Irish government department to fully embrace open source technology is paying off.