Open Source Business Intelligence

Mike Ferguson writes an interesting post on his blog. One of his statements is “10. The price of BI platforms is being pushed downward by several forces including the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 impact, the open source BI vendors (e.g. Jaspersoft, Pentaho), and the DW appliance vendors e.g. Data Allegro, GreenPlum, HP, IBM BCU, Kognitio, Netezza and others. BI vendors with high price points and ‘rental pricing’ may have to re-think their pricing strategy to compete otherwise customers may find cheaper equally good alternatives. “

Mike also predicted a big acquisition by one of the major vendors, and he was right about that !

An interesting article on Yahoo:

“Pentaho’s reporting engine, Pentaho Reporting, will be integrated with the next release of OpenOffice.org, version 2.3, which is due out in the second half of this year, according to Lance Walter, vice president of marketing at Pentaho. Sun and Pentaho had been in discussions for around a year about integrating BI functionality into OpenOffice.org, he said. Pentaho competes against fellow open-source BI players like JasperSoft and proprietary vendors like Cognos and Business Objects”

Shutting down Tomcat did the trick. The demo is rolling now. I will be looking into it in more detail over the next few days. But so far, my impression is that it is a very easy to use demo, which gives you a pretty quick insight into some over the functions of Pentaho. So, thumbs up so far !

After looking into the demo, I will be installing Pentaho from scratch. But, first things first.

If you want to check out the demo yourself, here the URL: http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?group_id=140317&use_mirror=&filename=pentaho_demo-1.2.0.534-GA.zip