Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Our baby OpenI is a Finalist on SourceForge: Please Vote!

One of my many professional roles is that of the project lead for OpenI, which is an open source BI web application that enables interactive analysis and reporting from OLAP, RDBMS, and data mining data sources. I am very proud to annouce that OpenI is now a finalist for the 2006 SourceForge Community Choice award in the Enterprise category. This is special because this puts OpenI is now in a select group of top 12 projects out of the 116,000-plus projects that exist today on SourceForge.

Now the time has come to cast the final deciding votes. Please go to the link below, select Enterprise category, and check OpenI -- it's that easy

http://sourceforge.net/awards/cca/

March 23rd is the last day of voting, so please vote now. And when you're done, please pass the word around -- we can use all the support/publicity :-)

A bit more on OpenI --at our company Loyalty Matrix, we developed OpenI out of necessity. Our main business is doing customer analytics and delivering actionable marketing insights. Microsoft SQL Server, with Analysis Services for OLAP, is our platform of choice. We needed a thin client web front end for client access. Nothing special you say.

But, the .MAC group at Apple is one of our clients. Guess what, Apple really doesn’t like to use Internet Explorer!

After spending significant time and money on comercial components, that claimed to be browser independent, we punted and decided to search out open source tools. Starting only a year ago last July, we are now about to release version 1.2 of OpenI which includes support for both SQL Server 2000 and 2005. Loyalty Matrix has been using OpenI in production for over six months to serve a number of clients including 24 Hour Fitness and Olivia in addition to Apple.

OpenI is a web-based application for business intelligence reporting, that enables users to analyze data and publish results over the web. Today, OpenI is consistently in the top 100 most active open source projects, with a growing and thriving community. More on OpenI at http://openi.sourceforge.net

Thanks for your support.