You Just Gotta Read This - Open Source BI On the Move

Either it was a slow news week over the July 4th holiday in the states, a great interview, or both. Matt Asay on his CNET blog The Open Road, did an interview with Pentaho's marketing VP, Lance Walter. You know you are dealing with a pro because Lance took the opening softball question from Matt and gave him both barrels, citing a Crystal Reports replacement, as well as the Pentaho win at Universite de Montreal against the entire BI category. The press release is a complete category smackdown of the usual suspects in BI - Cognos, Business Objects and Oracle. Go big or go home indeed.

Also interesting to see Lance speaking kindly of the Jaspersoft camp while asserting that Open Source is big enough for everyone and undercutting those with proprietary technology. This follows rule #2 of marketing - it is not truly a category if you are the only one in it.

Open source is clearly on the rise, and Pentaho seems to be the leading voice in BI. Not only good technology, but good gear. This is not exactly a rule in marketing, but it sure is nice to have. Disappointing that Pentaho seems to be going more corporate as they no longer offer lingerie as a How?Ho! gear selection.

Open Source--Who's Buying this Stuff???

We love to kid our old friend Lance Walter for chucking the trappings and benefits of the big corporate world to go off and make the world safe for software in the world of open-source, but with an estimated 40 million users on the OpenOffice.org platform, it's really no laughing matter.

So kudos to Lance and his gang at Pentaho, the leader in Open Source BI (did we get that right Lancer?) on their big announcement that the Pentaho reporting suite will now be offered as part of the OpenOffice.org functionality.

OK, all this .org stuff is starting to creep us out, so we're going to head back into the land of capitalism and rigid class structures if that's OK with everyone...