The company’s Pentaho Open BI suite, which includes components for OLAP, reporting, data mining and ETL, and workflow, was voted SourceForge.net’s October project of the month after it consistently drew over 100,000 downloads per month.
Pentaho officials were quick to point out that this alone represents more than the installed bases of incumbent commercial BI software providers like Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion Solutions. However they omitted to say that only a tiny percentage of those downloads result in production ready and deployed enterprise BI software applications.
Nevertheless its open source software does seem to be making some inroads in market. For example, Pentaho said that a major US airline is currently using Pentaho’s OLAP Analysis Services (based on the Mondrian open source project) to analyze half a terabyte of data for seat optimization and profitability.
Separately, Pentaho also announced that it has joined IBM’s partnership program and has certified both the Open and Professional versions of its BI suite for DB2 Express-C 9, IBM’s freely distributed relational database for developer and partner communities.The partnership targets small and medium sized businesses.
DB2 express-C 9, which IBM initially released in January as an alternative to open source databases, will be bundled in as a no-cost data server that is integrated into Penatho’s BI suite Pentaho was founded two years ago by ex-employees of commercial BI software firms like SAS Institute, Cognos and Hyperion. The company is the primary sponsor and owner of popular open source projects including JFreeReport (enterprise reporting), Kettle (ETL), and Weka (data mining).
