Even a small business generates giant quantities of data, and a good business intelligence suite helps you analyze and make sense of it all. When you have an accurate picture of where you are, you’ll see where you can go, and any of these excellent Linux-based small business intelligence suites will take you there.
JasperReports powers the Jaspersoft iReport Designer, which gives non-technical users the capability to create complex, sophisticated reports. In fact Jaspersoft’s strength is its excellent tools for end-users to slice, dice, and present data without having to be ace database gurus.
Talend is the Jaspersoft ETL (extract, transform, load) module, which is also used in numerous BI suites. This is the middleware that integrates data from multiple sources. Nobody has a single harmonious squeaky-clean database; it’s always ad-hoc and scattered, so an ETL layer is essential.
Jaspersoft is available as on-premises software, and of course as a hosted cloud service (which everyone, it seems, offers these days) and as a slick mobile BI interface for viewing and building reports. There is a free community edition, and multiple professional editions with different features and support levels.