As revealed by CBR recently, open source business intelligence firm Pentaho has pushed out its on-demand BI platform, which the firm says will give customers much greater control over deployment and management.
Pentaho’s On-Demand BI Suite Subscription enables companies to choose the level of involvement they feel comfortable with – meaning that the platform can be deployed and managed by them, Pentaho or a combination of both parties.
The move is the next step in Pentaho’s Agile BI service, and it enables companies to migrate their On-Demand BI Suite to their own premises at any time. Customers can also add CPUs, RAM, disk space and bandwidth as needed.
As Pentaho’s VP marketing Joe McGonnell told CBR back in May: “Our goal is to provide flexibility as to how Pentaho is deployed, and in particular to make it easy for people to move from on-premise to cloud [deployment], or from cloud deployment to on-premise. We’ll be offering the tools to let them do that.”
The platform also offers many of the other benefits associated with the SaaS model, including scalability, predictability of costs and flexibility.
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The On-Demand BI service is not a slimmed down version of Pentaho’s on-premise BI platform, as McGonnell explained to CBR: “We’ll use the VMware architecture to enable you to take what you have and move it on-premise or take on-premise and move it to the cloud but it’s the same product. There was an announcement from SAP in this area recently but what you find is that the cloud offering is a lighter weight version and as you start to try and scale up you may need to move to a different on-premise version.”
To prove the benefits of its service Pentaho has also announced a 72-Hour Challenge, which promises to have a full evaluation project up and running within 72 hours of a customer providing its data to Pentaho. This includes key performance indicators and relevant dashboards. The customer then has three weeks to explore the platform.
“Companies still sitting on the sidelines because they can’t see the tangible benefits of investing in a BI solution can now use our On-Demand BI evaluation services to explore the possibilities hidden in their own data,” said Dave Henry, vice president of services at Pentaho Corporation.
