According to Lance Walter, vice president of marketing at Pentaho, the Professional Edition is as good, if not better than the current crop of offerings from proprietary BI vendors – including Business Objects SA, a company that Walter himself used to work for until last December.
Set up in 2002 by seasoned BI executives from Hyperion Solutions, Cognos and SAS Institute, Pentaho has assembled a broad yet cohesive set of interoperable Java-based OLAP, reporting, data mining, workflow and (very recently) data integration software components that can be deployed individually or rapidly configured into a comprehensive BI suite.
The Professional Edition basically expands on the reporting, analysis and dashboarding functionality in the original Pentaho open source code to provide capabilities aimed at IT that support large-scale deployments and better manageability.
This includes a clustered architecture to deploy the software across multiple machines, application development lifecycle support, and report auditing and subscription services.
If you have 10 users and 10 reports you won’t need these capabilities. But if you have over 100 users and reports you most likely will, Walter said.
However, the added functions are based on proprietary code and aren’t available as open source. Walter 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.
One of the differentiated aspects of Pentaho’s BI suite is a built-in workflow capability that provides tighter integration with business processes beyond what most other BI tools typically offer today.
A lot of vendors see operational BI as next big opportunity to push BI deeper into applications, Walter said. But many BI vendors only integrate at the data level and usually have to partner with process management technologies to provide that.
We’ve architected our BI platform from scratch with process understanding at its core. We have an workflow engine in our platform that understands the BPEL [Business Process Execution Language] standard.
Whatever business rules are controlling the rest of a business, process can also be orchestrated to control Pentaho, he said. This allows companies to add BI to their processes with far less effort than traditional approaches. This is a big differentiator for us from a technology perspective.
The Professional Edition is expected to be launched soon, and will come with a price tag of $3,000 per CPU, with additional annual support charged at $1,000.
Walter said the company is putting the finishing touches on its commerce website, which will be the main sales channel for buying the software.
Pentaho is now confident that its ready to go to market with a commercial offering that can compete functionally with any current proprietary packaged BI suite being sold today, but at a fraction of the cost — as low as a seventh, according to Walter.
After a lengthy development, and some initial market skepticism, Pentaho BI certainly seems to be gaining steam and followers. It’s already listed as one of the top one hundred projects hosted on the Sourceforge.net nexus, a website that lists around 120,000 open source projects. The ranking is based on the number of downloads and activity.
Walter said that since the version 1 launch of the open source code in December 2005, Pentaho has reported downloads north of 30,000 per month – which, he believes outstrips other open source projects like JasperReports and Actuate/Eclipse-led BIRT.
Walter said he’d be happy with a 1-2% conversion rate of downloads into paying Professional Edition customers. It’s a good time for us to go to market with a commercial offering since all the big proprietary BI vendors are transitioning their customers to their next generation BI platforms.
But he said the goal, right now at least, wasn’t necessarily to usurp existing BI implementations in place. We’re initially pursuing a land-and-expand strategy, looking mainly at departmental BI opportunities in organizations.
Most of the customers we’re engaged with right now are already Business Objects and Cognos customers, he said. They’re not looking to rip out and replace these investments with Pentaho. Rather they’re looking to use Pentaho to support new departments that are coming online with BI or to support extranet applications that they’re putting up. They don’t want to throw more money at their existing BI suppliers for this.
With the BPEL capabilities in hand, and the recent addition of open source ETL software (which Pentaho recently acquired from Kettle) Walter said that Pentaho shouldn’t just be seen as another open source BI vendor.
While other open source BI projects like JasperReports and BIRT tend to focus narrowly on reporting we deliver a much broader range of BI capabilities, he said. We want to be judged as a BI suite provider.
