Lately more vendors are moving towards the availability of free access to a specific set of their overall offerings. For some this means total access to solutions but with a limited number of users, and for others, this means access to reporting or the ability to pull data from a limited number of data sources. Either way, the affect of open source vendors such as Pentaho, Actuate, and Jaspersoft has been great on the way solution providers expand towards making their solutions more accessible to organizations.
With leading vendors such as QlikView offering free personal use, and Microstrategy with their new reporting suite that offers full functionality for free for up to 100 users, the way in which BI is used and assessed is changing. Most vendors offer free trials to help organizations get up and running, but with the availability of these new free solutions, will limited trials continue to be enough to satiate users and provide long term value to companies?
Only time will tell — what is happening, however, is that BI is slowly shifting so that smaller organizations or organizations with a small number of BI users to access and develop their own solutions for limited or no cost.
