BI and Performance Management Trends for 2007

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 !

 

Next OpenOffice release to include Pentaho BI

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”

 

Pentaho ctd.

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

 

Pentaho installation

I am making my first steps in evaluating Pentaho. That means downloading the software, and installing my Virtual PC environment  (Windows 2003, TomCat and MySQL preconfigured) with Pentaho. I have downloaded software from the Pentaho website (community/downloads), and picked out the Pentaho Open BI Suite (Pre-Configured Installation) version for Windows, Release 1.2.0 GA (Build 534). This version promises me: “Ready to serve, Pentaho Open BI Suite is deployed into a pre-installed and configured JBoss Application Server. In addition, it contains ready to use solution repositories including sets of reports demonstrating functionality and to help you get started. The latest version contains a preview of features of the upcoming Reporting Server.” This is an 121 Mb download. The release notes can be found on SourceForge.net. What I also read is “Extract and run”. Promising. The first question I have now (after extracting, that part is easy), is WHAT do I run. I have a start-pentaho.bat file, with the following commands:

@echo on
setlocal
set PENTAHO_PATH=%~dp0
set JAVA_HOME=%PENTAHO_PATH%jre
set PATH=%PENTAHO_PATH%jre\bin
cd data
start start_hypersonic.bat
cd ..\jboss\bin
start run < lines.txt
Hm, let’s first look at the “English – Getting Started with the BI_Platform 1.2.0″ guide, which is intended for people who want to get the platform up and running in 10 minutes. It’s 15:57 now. Some delay, as the files still had to be extracted to my Virtual env.  The documentation is really well structured, as you only need to read the green boxes, when you want to install the stuff on a Windows box.

Two command boxes open, they should, after 30 seconds, tell me “Pentaho BI Platform server ready”. And, localhost:8080 should display a nice Pentaho starting screen. However, none of the above happens. 16:29: Let’s do a reboot.

I’ll be back.

 

JasperSoft and Pentaho

JasperSoft and Pentaho will be the first targets. We will investigate this thoroughly, and both Face (on Pentaho) and Hannibal (on JasperSoft) will be back to report about what we can build with those tools.

 

Open Source BI, the past & the future

Welcome to the BI Team blog, dedicated entirely to open source Business Intelligence. We will investigate the BI marketspace, historically dominated by Cognos, Business Intelligence, Informatica, Information Builders, Oracle, and a bunch of others. We will try and find all the available open source BI initiaves, and investigate them, from a technical, functional, and other aspects we can think of as well. Doesn’t this sound fascinating ?

But, let me first introduce myself. I am Templeton “Face” Peck, friends call me Face. I will introduce co-authors as well. The first co-author for this blog is John “Hannibal” Smith.