In a report by Gartner's Andreas Bitterer at the start of the year, the analyst made it clear that open-source business intelligence products are no longer solely the choice of price-conscious, small companies or a departmental stop-gap but have hit the mainstream.

Bitterer said that open-source BI competition is very much on the radar of the larger, incumbent suppliers, such as IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, Oracle and SAS Institute: "While often dismissed as being no competition, even the large established BI vendors have come up with countermeasures to address the challenges from the lower-cost competitors."

A good example of the dismissal of these open-source BI providers came just last month, when the SAS Institute CEO Jim Goodnight said, "We haven't noticed [open-source BI] a lot. Most of our companies need industrial-strength software that has been tested; put through every possible scenario or failure to make sure everything works correctly."

But the open source firms believe they are leading a new wave in the business intelligence market.

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