Pentaho Marks Second Anniversary with 1.5 Million Downloads

ORLANDO, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Pentaho Corp., creator of the world’s most popular open source business intelligence (BI) suite, today celebrates its second anniversary with over 1.5 million downloads since the inception of the company, recent selection as SourceForge.net Project of The Month for October, and recognition by Forbes magazine as a “revolutionary” in the software industry. In only two years, Pentaho and the Pentaho community have redefined and expanded the BI industry with a professional open source business model that addresses the need for reporting, analysis, dashboards, data mining and data integration without the expense and shortcomings of proprietary BI solutions.

“Pentaho is clearly changing the landscape of BI by empowering organizations to escape the legacy technology, complex upgrade cycles, and expense of proprietary BI”

Today, Pentaho’s projects are downloaded more than 100,000 times a month, representing more users than the installed bases of proprietary BI stalwarts Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion combined. Those downloads have translated into production applications like reporting and analysis of sales performance, dashboards monitoring key performance indicators in organizations around the world, and include a number of implementations in large-scale production environments. For example:

A major U.S.-based airline uses Pentaho Analysis Services to analyze and optimize per-seat profitability using more than half a terabyte of historical data.
A leading global travel services company uses Pentaho Reporting and the Pentaho BI Platform to support a self-service reporting portal deployed to thousands of travel agents around the world.
A national traffic control center in Europe uses Pentaho Data Integration to support analysis of traffic flow information, managing a data warehouse with more than a billion rows of data that is growing at a rate of more than one hundred million rows per month.

The impact of the open source BI movement pioneered by Pentaho is reflected in a May 2006 report by Ventana Research indicating that more than four out of five organizations surveyed were evaluating, deploying or in production with open source BI. Each of the hundreds of respondents indicated that they were already using proprietary BI software somewhere in the organization.

“Pentaho is clearly changing the landscape of BI by empowering organizations to escape the legacy technology, complex upgrade cycles, and expense of proprietary BI,” said Richard Daley, Founder and CEO of Pentaho. “For the first time, businesses have a comprehensive, standards-based BI alternative that makes it possible to use all of their information assets effectively with no software license fees.”

Addressing the BI Challenge

Before Pentaho launched its open source BI platform, all BI software providers followed a traditional proprietary model that locked customers into high upfront costs and license fees as well as expensive, inflexible and long upgrade cycles. In addition, the monolithic architectures and named-user, role-based licensing models of proprietary BI software created significant barriers to large-scale deployments designed to bring BI capabilities to front-line employees.

Pentaho has addressed these problems by offering an integrated, open, easy-to-use BI suite that can be deployed on a modular basis, is continuously and non-disruptively upgraded, and was architected for easy integration with operational applications in order to provide full access to BI capabilities to users at all levels of an organization. Pentaho components can be deployed as embedded services within applications or as a self-contained end user BI environment, while the professional open source model and standards support dramatically reduce the total cost of ownership.

Pentaho’s open source BI platform has also brought the benefits of business intelligence to geographic regions that had previously been unable to utilize BI on any scale for economic reasons. The Pentaho community now extends to more than 100 countries, providing world-class BI technology to new communities.

“Before we introduced our open BI suite, many organizations were unable to fully leverage the information in their various databases because of the high cost, complexity and difficulty of deploying proprietary BI software,” said James Dixon, Founder and CTO of Pentaho. “We have completely changed the paradigm in just two years, and we continue to build on that foundation to help businesses become more efficient and profitable.”

About Pentaho

Pentaho provides a full spectrum of business intelligence (BI) capabilities including reporting, analysis, dashboards, data mining, data integration, and a BI platform that have made it the world’s most popular open source BI suite. Formed by a highly experienced team of industry veterans, Pentaho’s mission is to bring innovative, high quality technology and professional support to the BI market. Pentaho uses a revolutionary approach to development, distribution and support made possible by a professional open source business model. Pentaho is the primary sponsor and owner of popular open source projects including JFreeReport, Kettle, Mondrian, and Weka. Pentaho’s technologies support a wide range of business initiatives from sales and profitability analysis, customer analysis, HR reporting, Financial reporting, KPI dashboards, Supply Chain analytics, and operational reporting.