As organizations amass significantly large volumes of data, there is increasing need to derive actionable intelligence from this data. Unfortunately, the growing Business Intelligence (BI) market is dominated by a few enterprise software solutions, with all the menaces of proprietary software -- vendor lock-in, high license costs, and difficult integrations. This situation calls for open source intervention and, fortunately, OpenI has answered.

Four fundamental technologies empower BI: ETL, OLAP, Data Mining, and Data Visualization. Several open source projects address these technologies individually, but leave the integration work to individual developers. This affects mainstream adoption of open source BI solutions. Project OpenI consolidates open source BI components into a single J2EE application leveraging open standards such as XML for Analysis (XMLA). Now, with a single install, end users can start ad hoc analysis of their data sources. Released in July 2005, OpenI is consistently among the top 100 active projects on sourceforge.

This presentation will take the audience through a typical implementation of OpenI to transform data into actionable intelligence. Specifically, it will describe the following components:

• ETL components to organize data into dimensional models
• Data Mining components to discover patterns, correlations, and causality
• OLAP components to summarize data for ad hoc analysis and define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
• Visualization components to define interactive reports and publish on the Web

Overall, the audience will learn to utilize OpenI and other open source components to build BI solutions on top of their MySQL data sources.