Impact of Open Source Technology on Analytics

By CIOReview | Friday, May 19, 2017

In this ever-changing business environment, technological revolution has been taking place at a lightning pace. The advent of open source software has transformed the way enterprises work with traditional proprietary software systems. The constantly-evolving nature of open source, in tandem with demand of advanced analytics projects for faster and secure platforms have enticed organizations to adopt open source software systems. Alike Hadoop, open source technology have significantly transformed the analytics landscape in data management. It has almost transfigured the way BI and analytic providers work, the way they provide script support and more. The advent of open source analytics, along with its modest licensing costs, extreme mutability, agility, and growing support of community users has not only impacted the data sphere but has affected the whole of IT industry.

With the help of open source analytics, companies are able to improve the project by contributing to it, adding advanced features at their will, and collectively moving the platform forward. One of the main reasons why software vendors choose open source platforms is to be independent. Most of the times vendors and their platforms are well supported while in contract, but if the firm wants to move on, the relationship gets tarnished. With an open source platform, enterprises can be independent from vendor’s proprietary software stack. It also allows them to be part of a community.

Most of the analytic companies today, make use of open source platform to create beautiful visualizations to help showcase their data in a more organized way. It also helps to get better results and since it is open source, it can work with the combined talents of data scientists across the world. Open Source platform can act as an economical effective marketing tool. When companies publish all or a part of the product for the online developer community it allures people who will help build the product after seeing what it is capable of doing.

Another point that claims open source to be more beneficial is it reduces customer support costs because the users can figure out problems on their own. At the same time they can even fix problem through optimum solutions and put out to all users for free. Open source allows speed. One of the huge advantages of open source is the ability to attract the community versions, understand whether they are able to solve business problem, and begin to deliver value right away. This ensures enterprise gets the best of both worlds—flexibility, agility, and the ability to get started quickly and inexpensively, without having to muddle with proprietary licensing hurdles.

There is no second thought, Open source analytics is the future of tomorrow. With the web, mobile, and cloud solutions predominantly built on open source infrastructure, the open source analytics have carved a niche. The key factor that sets open source analytic apart from others is some data and analytic solutions are only available in open source. Future architectures are highly likely to be based on open source, as they are today in mobile solutions with the Android platform.

The capability of Open Source analytics is conceivably most evident in terms of advanced analytics and how it is associated to Big Data technologies. Many enterprises today are adopting advanced analytics and moving beyond conventional approaches such as BI reporting, descriptive analytics and diagnostic analytics. Today, advanced analytics such as predictive modeling, clustering, affinity analysis and optimization have changed the face of data analytics. Finally, by offering greater production control across the supply chain and beyond, open source analytics will definitely continue to be in the integral part of every enterprise.