A business looking for BI should always consider the alternatives when evaluating a Business Intelligence solution. From my experience, I have found that Open Source BI, including Pentaho Open Source Business Intelligence, offers what you would expect from a proprietary BI vendor. I can say this with much conviction and confidence because I worked for a proprietary BI vendor for 9 years, Information Builders…

Commercial Open Source Business Intelligence company Pentaho is joining the roster of applications available via Amazon.com Inc.’s EC2 Web hosting service.

Companies will be able to “rent” the new release of Pentaho, Version 3.0, via EC2. That arrangement should lower the upfront start-up costs of using Pentaho — though those costs were already low to begin with. A Pentaho subscription is a fraction of what a proprietary vendor would charge you for software licenses alone.

At one time, Open Source software had a stigma about being poorly documented. In my opinion, I believe that has changed for the most part. While working for Pentaho, a Commercial Open Source BI company, I have taken part in tasks that help create awareness around our software. It involves many resources made available to understand it, use it, explore it, modify it and even evolve it. Whether it is creating Wiki pages, video tutorials, tech tips, and blog entries or working with documentation services, I have come to find that having a successful implementations or evaluations really comes down to two things.

With each passing day I am continually amazed at the power and flexibility of the Pentaho BI Suite and its architecture. With the Pentaho Dashboard Designer, found in the new Pentaho Enterprise Edition 3.0, I was able to add the capability for even the non-technical business user to utilize “dynamic” Google mapping mash-ups. “Dynamic” meaning that the map displayed and its points, are based off of what the user selects from the input screen.

Many times, too many to count, I have companies requesting a BI tool that “Offers great flexibility and powerful enough for developers to use but easy enough for end users to use as well”. This is a very common misplaced expectation that people have. The reason is simple, there is an direct relationship between flexibility and complexity.

The UK government has said it will accelerate the use of open source software in public services.

Tom Watson MP, minister for digital engagement, said open source software would be on a level playing field with proprietary software such as Windows.