Pentaho accelerates its business, upgrades its board and executive team
Life sounds sunny for Florida-based Pentaho, a leading open-source Business Intelligence vendor. The company just announced a string of big-name customer wins, including Delta Dental, Mozilla, and a $1 million deal with a "major European retailer."
The company also announced that Lars Nordwall, former head of Sales for SugarCRM, has joined as senior vice president of Business Development. I know and like Lars and think he'll be a great fit for Pentaho. It's also a chance for him to work on his tan this winter, since the Bay Area is so cold.... :-)
Lastly, Pentaho has added Zack Urlocker to its board. Zack is the vice president of Products within Sun's database group and one of the best people I've ever known. Having him on board the Pentaho bus is excellent news.
I suspect some of Pentaho's go-go growth will slow with the US economy, but with these improvements to its team it's well-positioned to weather the storm and come out on top.
Disclosure: I am an advisor to JasperSoft, an open-source competitor to Pentaho.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
While its likely open source software companies will likely be impacted by a slowdown in the economy, the reality is that open source helps companies help IT save money. In the last downturn we saw dramatic growth in open source adoption. Why? Because at the end of the day IT organizations care more about having people on staff to get projects done than they do in the "name brand" of closed source software. Lets face it, if you have to chose between spending 50K on a closed source software license or having the staff on board to implement something you'll go with open source.
So as long as open source companies focus on providing value and saving TCO, I think they will weather this storm. And smart IT organizations will realize that they can reduce budgets without canceling projects if they go open source.
--Zack