UK's NHS buys into open-source Business Intelligence
Who says the United Kingdom doesn't grok open source? Well, I do, for one, but the UK's National Health Service, which has notoriously bought big with Microsoft in the past (resulting in a Microsoft-specific page for NHS employees), is looking beyond Redmond to open-source Pentaho for its business intelligence needs, according to this IT-Finance Connection podcast.
This is important news for all open-source vendors, as it introduces a crack in the Microsoft dam within the NHS and, ultimately, the entire UK government sector.
Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell the NHS and Microsoft, since they're promoting a series of Microsoft BI-focused training events.
So, Microsoft and proprietary software isn't losing its place within the NHS and UK government anytime soon, but Pentaho's beachhead is good news for it, as well as everyone else in the open-source business community that wants to do business in the UK. It's about time.
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. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
