Gartner's Business Intelligence Summit kicked off today to (apparently) standing room only crowds. But apparently open source BI isn't what is packing them in, at least according to Conference Chair Bill Hostmann's opening address:Hostmann was somewhat dismissive of open-source BI , saying the term is becoming "kind of like the word 'organic' in the grocery business. "It's starting to lose its meaning, with some Gartner’s Business Intelligence Summit kicked off today to (apparently) standing room only crowds. But apparently open source BI isn’t what is packing them in, at least according to Conference Chair Bill Hostmann’s opening address:Hostmann was somewhat dismissive of open-source BI , saying the term is becoming “kind of like the word ‘organic’ in the grocery business. “It’s starting to lose its meaning, with some ‘open-source’ vendors demanding licensing fees,” he explained. “Open source is promising, but the business models and products haven’t kept up with the commercial products.”The problem with this view (not the least reason being his somewhat contradictory view that “good enough” BI will dominate by 2010, which surely favors open source newcomers to the market) is that it may well be focusing on the wrong BI market, as Seth Grimes suggests:Open-source business intelligence has changed nothing, yet it is making all the difference in the world. What conclusion other than the first can you draw from analyst indifference and the yawns of established BI and enterprise application vendors? Six years after the launch of the open-source Mondrian OLAP server – widely used in the open-source (OS) world – there’s no trace of open-source BI (OSBI) anywhere in Gartner’s 2007 BI magic quadrant analysis. Yet Mondrian is the analytical core of at least four OSBI suites – JasperAnalysis, OpenI, Pentaho, and SpagoBI – and the packagers claim to be “selling” software like hotcakes. Clearly the explanation for the seeming contradiction is that we have two or even three different BI markets at work…. The hidden world of J2EE developers: that’s where OSBI is making all the difference. Those developers are building BI functions into line-of-business applications for the Web and the enterprise. They’re bringing analytics to places and people who don’t know they’re doing BI or who can’t match the SAPistas’ fat wallets. We experts have been predicting BI for the Masses for years. I’m beginning to suspect that it will be open-source business intelligence that delivers.I’ve been watching this happen with JasperSoft, and I’m sure the other open source BI players are doing the same. They are transforming BI into something “out there” to something “inside” a range of other applications, like content management. Demerit to Hostmann for looking backward for his analysis of the industry. Advantage: Grimes. Open SourceBusiness Intelligence