Top 5 Java-Based Tools for Business Intelligence

In software and IT, performance and revenue are measured by none other than Business Intelligence software. But, in the Java world, there are plenty of open source solutions available in the market.

These are the top 5 and most popular Java tools used via several open source projects.

Pentaho BI - It is based on the Java Enterprise Edition while it runs on the JBoss web server. This is used for integrating data and data mining processes that help in complicated business analytics fields. Also, it possesses a strong base of workflow automation opportunities, which makes it suitable for reporting needs and analysis. This has a record of over 10,000 weekly downloads from SourceForge.net and approximately 2,800 downloads per week from the Jasper reports.

Jasper Reports Server - This is a popular BI toolkit based on Mondrian and JPivot for OLAP. This can be used for analyzing and using non-relational (NoSQL) databases like Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB, Neo4j, and Riak. The Jasper Reports have been well established and appreciated with high scores from Rod Cope at Open Logic, especially for a better user interface and clean documentation, as compared to Pentaho as mentioned above.

Splunk - This is yet another BI tool which is quite different from the rest and it allows you to collect, index, and search your organization’s data without any hassle. The functionality of Splunk has been best described by Brian Gilmore, the Product Manager for Enterprise Intelligence at McKenney's. He described that once all the information is fed into Splunk on a 1 minute, 5 minute, or 15 minute basis, all the information, like the device from which the data has been obtained, the location of the information in the field, the affected users (if any), etc., can be easily obtained. A complete and detailed snapshot is available quite easily with Splunk.

Karmasphere - The Karmasphere Studio is based on Eclipse and is also popular in the BI domain. Plugins are the base of the integrated development platform. Karmasphere is actually designed for data mining in Hadoop and combines all its tools together so you can start off using the Amazon Elastic Map Reduce program. Here, the original data is processed on Hadoop rather than being replicated or pre-processed. As a quick fact, Karmasphere was acquired by FICO in 2014 where Doug Clare, VP of Product management, mentioned that we are actually increasing democratization and the mass adoption of big data analytics in all probable organizations and business units.

BIRT by Eclipse - Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools is an open source project which has been sponsored by Actuate. This has been designed, mostly, for use with Java web applications. It is made up of a design engine, a report engine, and a chart engine, each of which is compatible with OSGi. The products available from BIRT are a report designer, ca hart builder, and an example viewer. The report designer and chart building provides a 3 tab wizard which can create an EMF chart.

These Java-based tools are open source solutions that provide customization and flexibility. Some of these are available for commercial licensing but there are other, more basic, ones and are available for free.

So pick and choose your BI tool and optimize business process with maximum efficiency!