More Funding for Open Source BI

March 18, 2008 · Filed Under BI, Open Source

A post on the BI for business people blog comments on the recent round of funding for Pentaho, an U.S. based open source BI vendor. Pentaho offers a full featured business intelligence suite, and they have positioned themselves as a competitor against Cognos, Business Objects, Hyperion and Microsoft. However, in a head to head competition, I don’t think Pentaho is a winner. They can offer lower upfront licensing costs, but this is offset with the risk of an increased total cost of ownership.
I think where Pentaho, and other open source BI vendors, will gain market share is in the following situations:

In the SMB space, where cost is an issue and BI deployments are less complex.
As a development platform for managed or hosted service providers.
For ISVs looking to embed a full featured reporting or OLAP solution into their product.
Where heavy customization is required.
Where interoperability with other systems is complicated.

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