Open Source Weblog

The Pentaho BI project made its debut in June 2005 with new open source reporting, analysis, data mining and workflow software components, and grew quickly thanks to $5m in series A funding from New Enterprise Associates and Index Ventures.

The Mondrian OLAP Server project was added to the stack in November 2005, while the JFreeReport project joined the Pentaho open source community as a "permanent member" in January, with JFreeReport's creator, Thomas Morgner, becoming Pentaho's chief architect of reporting solutions.

The ad-hoc open source growth was accompanied by a good old-fashioned acquisition in April when the Kettle project was officially acquired by Pentaho to bolster its data integration capabilities in the areas of extract, transform and load (ETL) and enterprise information integration (EII), with Matt Casters, founder and primary sponsor of the Kettle project, joining the Pentaho team as a data integration architect.

The acquisition of Kettle was important as it filled an ETL-shaped whole in the Pentaho portfolio, which also boasts the JPivot, Firebird RDBMS, Shark, Weka Data Mining, and Eclipse BIRT projects, better positioning Pentaho against Greenplum, JasperSoft, and Kinetic Networks, which have banded together to assemble a similar open source BI suite as part of the Bizgres Project.

According to Lance Walter, vice president of marketing at Pentaho, its Professional Edition product is good enough to compete not only with Greenplum/JasperSoft/Kinetic but is "as good, if not better" than the current crop of offerings from proprietary BI vendors.

Whether that is the case or not the added functions - such as a clustered architecture to deploy the software across multiple machines, application development lifecycle support, and report auditing and subscription services - are based on proprietary code and aren't available as open source.

Walter also confirmed that around 10% of the capabilities included in the Professional Edition aren't packaged as pure open source. "Most of that [proprietary] code is around administration and deployment options. The only end-user part that's proprietary is a feature around deployment of self-service subscriptions for accessing reports."

It also comes at a price - starting at $1,000 per CPU for either the Pentaho Reporting Server Professional Edition with Platinum Support or the Pentaho BI Suite Professional Edition with Platinum Support. Subscription support for the open source components is also available starting at the same price.

So what is the chance of success for Pentaho? According to my colleague (and BI expert) Madan Sheina it could still take the adoption of open source BI by the likes of IBM to really put it on the corporate map but there are significant opportunities given the cost of traditionally expensive BI implementations. Open source has succeeded in many other areas with seemingly little more on its side.