Inside the Briefcase
Autonomic Resources Implements Open Source BI Project for National Institute of Food and Agriculture
February 1, 2011 No CommentsSOURCE: Autonomic Resources
Autonomic Resources, an IT and service integration firm serving the U.S. federal government, announced today the completion of an open source Business Intelligence (BI) implementation for the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), an agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The implementation included solutions from Jaspersoft, the world’s most widely used business intelligence platform, Infobright, the open source analytic database company, and Talend, a global open source software leader. Autonomic has also added these leading BI solutions to its fast-growing open source store, making them readily available to federal agencies under the GSA schedule.
NIFA began investigating open source solutions for its BI needs as the organization began outgrowing its previous platform. As the complexity of NIFA’s reporting increased, the organization began to experience performance issues with SAP Crystal Reports. In order to handle the growing challenges, NIFA determined it would need to migrate up to a full suite of BusinessObjects, which was not an option from a cost perspective. Autonomic worked with NIFA to develop an open source BI solution that included Jaspersoft, Infobright and Talend. The solution enables NIFA to generate reports faster and also provides a format that is easier for the organization’s many partners to understand. The organization was also able to quickly realize a significant cost savings, in both implementation and development expenditures.
“There has definitely been a movement within the federal government to look at open source for controlling costs,” said Joseph Barbano, Leadership Management Dashboard project manager with NIFA. “We required a solution that would enable us to turn data around much faster, be more responsive to our partners, and produce reports that were easy to understand. And, we needed to do all of this in a way that was not as cost-prohibitive as our old solution.”
