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.
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.
Pentaho has released its Pentaho BI (Business Intelligence) Platform under the GNU General Public License, Version 2. What does this mean?
Specifically, the Platform engine core, Platform engine services, Platform engine security, Platform repository, and UI foundation will be changed to the GPLv2 license. Going forward, Pentaho will require third-parties who want to contribute code to these components to release that code under the GPL license.
This is a bold move by Pentaho, one that brings all (or virtually all) of its software under an open-source license.
It's a move that would be easier to ignore if Pentaho weren't simultaneously announcing big-name customers like Delta Dental, which Pentaho won at SAP's expense.
The reason? Delta Dental found that it could "achieve their business goals more quickly while reducing their costs" with Pentaho's open-source solution. Smart move, Delta Dental, and great work, Pentaho.
If there was an open question as to which venture capital firm is the king of open source, Benchmark just settled that question with its most recent investment in Pentaho, a leading open-source Business Intelligence company. Not surprisingly, Peter Fenton is behind the deal.
Pentaho competes with other open-source BI companies like JasperSoft and Actuate (and I suppose Greenplum, too, in a way), but the more interesting competition is the big proprietary vendors (Business Objects, Cognos, etc.) and the net new opportunities bringing BI to the masses.
It will be intriguing to see how this investment pans out for Benchmark. The firm has so many eggs in the open-source basket that it will either (continue to) win big (Red Hat, Zimbra, MySQL, etc.), or lose big. My bet is on the former outcome.
I spent some time today with Matt Vitale, executive vice president of Sales at Pentaho, about how things are going at the open-source Business Intelligence company. Very well, and as it turns out, the consolidation in the BI market is helping to turn good quarters into great ones from the sales perspective.
Cognos, Hyperion, and Business Objects have all been put on the auction block and have found new homes in ever-dwindling numbers of software vendors. As Matt suggested, this consolidation has helped to create a "perfect storm" of customer "confusion and angst," a lack of vendor choice and visibility into the future of chosen products, and the omnipresent expensive and proprietary bloatware. All of this is pointing to alternatives like Software as a Service and open source.
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I spent a half-hour this morning talking with Lance Walter, VP of Marketing for Pentaho, a leading open source Business Intelligence vendor. I wanted to see if Pentaho's experience in the market matches up with what other open source application companies are seeing.
Indeed. The good news of open source goes well beyond any one particular vendor.
Question: I hear good things about Pentaho all the time. Can you give me a high-level update?
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Glyn Moody has an excellent article in Redmond Magazine on open source and interoperability. As it turns out, sometimes it takes Microsoft to notify the open-source community that for all the great things we've done, we sometimes fall short. One area that open source had traditionally failed in was in stitching together an end-to-end solution, as Nick McGrath (a friend and a wonderful person) suggests:
Of all the accusations Microsoft has leveled over the years against open source, perhaps the least contentious is that it lacks the tight integration offered by Microsoft's own products. As Nick McGrath, director of platform strategy for Microsoft in the United Kingdom, puts it: "One of the problems I've seen with open-source software is it doesn't take on board some of the issues that customers have around interoperability and integration. Open-source projects tend to offer a very specific point solution."
This statement has become less true over time, though it's still the case that there is no one open-source vendor providing seamless interoperability between disparate pieces of enterprise software (in the way that Oracle and Microsoft do or attempt to do). My bet is on Red Hat to become that company over time, but in the meantime, we're not there yet.
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