Zach Skyles Owens

I recently stumbled across the Pentaho Business Intelligence Suite and so far I’m really impressed. After doing some research what I discovered is that Pentaho is an Open Source BI company with a service oriented revenue model. What they have done is hired the key developers from a variety of Open Source products such as JFree and built/enhanced those core technologies for an end-to-end BI solution. They were founded by five (hence the “pent”) extremely accomplished BI experts and have been marketing themselves for less then a year.

I have had some insightful answers to technical questions I’ve posted on their forums which is a requirement for a quality open source project. I’ve also been told that their lead engineers spend a certain portion of their time doing technical support so at this point you may actually be able to get the product developer on the phone if you are having issues.

If you are interested in checking them out, running their Pre-Configuration Installation was a quick three step process on my Windows workstation.

• Download the Pentaho Open BI Suite
• Unzip the Product
• Click on “start-pentaho.bat”

I ran into some issues getting it to run on my Fedora Core 6 workstation, but I think those are related to some configuration issues on my end.

This will provide you with a JBoss Application Server and Portal running a bunch of well put together BI Reports and Dashboards. It even has an example Dashboard with Google Maps integration.

If you end up checking this out or have implementation experience with their products please let me know as we are evaluating using some of their components in a project right now.

Technorati Tags: Pentaho, Open Source, Business Intelligence, Red Hat, JBoss, Fedora, JFree

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Business & Technology, Business Intelligence, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.