The BI Initiative is a join effort of OW2 and not-OW2 members set up to:

• Improve the coordination effort in the Open Source Business Intelligence area
• Increase utilization of OS BI solutions at enterprise level
• Strengthen connections between OS companies and users and the research communities.
• Attract more attention from the EU Funded Research activities to foster “Innovative BI solutions and practices”.

The BI Initiative aims at fostering the growth of a business ecosystem in the Open Source Business Intelligence (OS BI) domain bringing business opportunities to new class stakeholders. The BI Initiative will promote the development and evolution of a new, community driven generation of OS business intelligence tools, as well as innovative methodologies for their adoption and application to distributed business processes.

The BI Initiative aims as well at providing:

• A new BI experience – driven by end users’ needs, supported by a new generation of BI infrastructure and providing a new market approach
• A Business Intelligence qualification – promoting actual OW2 technologies, bringing them to the mainstream; building up using new technologies, new open source components, adopting open standards; providing periodical reports, white papers, benchmark, real world use cases
• Alternative business and technology break-through drivers – through open development activities, an open service network, a wider participation in order to achieve a significant dimension and authoritative position, a collaborative approach and a co- authoring method.

The BI Initiative will initially carry out the following activities:

• Integration of a full stack of OS BI solutions and tools, such as DataBase, ETL, BI Platform
• Promotion of a service network to support the stack
• Kick-starting a community of individuals and organizations contributing to the development of a new generation of OS BI tools (to be inserted in the stack in the near future), sharing knowledge on their adoption in a diverse set of domains
• Creation of a research network on BI topics in order to encourage dissemination of results and cross-fertilization with neighbouring research areas and to promote the BI theme in the European research agenda
• Fostering a closer cooperation between researchers and OS BI developers, aimed on one hand at a faster incorporation of the new and advanced techniques into OS tools (thus creating a competitive advantage over commercial tools) and, on the other hand, at encouraging researchers to use OS platforms for testing and benchmarking.