Linux-powered BI appliance arrives

An open-source business intelligence appliance powered by Suse Linux has been released by database maker Ingres and Italian infrastructure software provider Engineering Ingegneria Informatica.

The SpagoBI appliance, announced on Thursday, is based on the open-source business intelligence (BI) suite SpagoBI, along with the Ingres database and Novell's Suse Linux 11.

It is distributed as a virtual machine and preconfigured for business intelligence analysis tasks, allowing companies to launch new business intelligence processes without the need for much set-up time, the companies said.

Last year, Gartner found that business intelligence has been enjoying a boom despite the less-than-healthy state of the global economy. The analyst firm said this growth is partly down to consolidation in the industry, as big vendors have focused on promoting the BI technology they have acquired to their existing customers.

The SpagoBI appliance is the result of Engineering's SpagoWorld project and the OW2 Business Intelligence Initiative, managed by the OW2 Consortium. The OW2 Consortium is a nonprofit organisation founded by Inria, Groupe Bull and France Télécom that produces open-source middleware for e-business, clustering and grid computing.

Engineering Ingegneria Informatica said the release of the SpagoBI Analytical Appliance shows the richness of the SpagoBI development process.

"(SpagoBI) is a solution that is continuously growing over time, with an increasing number of innovative features and a more and more user-friendly approach," said SpagoBI technical manager Stefano Scamuzzo in a statement.

SpagoBI Analytical Appliance can be downloaded for free from OW2 Consortium Forge, and users can choose a support plan jointly handled by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, Ingres and Novell, or a simpler plan offered by Engineering's SpagoBI team.