The Global 2000 is nice. The Fortune 500 is very nice. But selling into the Fortune 50 — especially for a small open source company like Pentaho — is extra sweet. Pentaho, which recently launched version 2.0 of its open source business intelligence software, says it has won business with several Fortune 50 companies. And Pentaho’s partner network is expanding. Here’s the scoop.
Sure, traditional BI companies continue to perform well. Earlier this year, The VAR Guy moderated a few CIO-focused conferences for the SAS Institute — one of the largest privately held software companies in the world. Over and over again, CIOs described how they leverage SAS’s BI and business analytics software to plan marketing and promotion efforts.
Still, there is a market void here. Open source companies like Pentaho and Jaspersoft are seeking to disrupt the traditional BI market by providing easier-to-deploy, lower-cost solutions to channel partners and customers.
One impressed customer, a European retailer, recently placed a $1 million order for Pentaho after a successful pilot engagement, Pentaho claims. Other recent adopters include ZipRealty, Mozilla and Delta Dental of Virginia. Recent Pentaho partners include Hewlett-Packard, Infobright, MySQL, Openbravo, Red Hat, SGI, Sun, Unisys and Vertica.
Somewhere in the list of companies above, Pentaho claims, there lurks a few Fortune 50 companies running Pentaho. Oh, and Pentaho does have a growing list of resellers and integrators.
That’s right: Open source BI is a channel play, folks.
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Tags: Jaspersoft | MySQL | Open Source business intelligence | Openbravo | Pentaho | SAS Institute | Vertica
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Keep on disrupting the traditional BI market Pentaho. This is creative destruction at its finest! We’re quite pleased with their software here in our office, but perhaps not as impressed as this mystery $1 million Euro customer. Makes me think European businesses could be further ahead of the open source curve than us here in the states. We’ll see.
We’re a global 2000 with two divisions looking at Pentaho. I suspect it will be live in production in 09. Estmated cost savings is in the six figures just for year 1.
Mike: Overall, The VAR Guy suspects, open source is a bit more established in the US. But that doesn’t hold true for all markets. Remember, SUSE Linux was dominant in Germany long before Novell strengthened its US presence. And start-ups like Spain’s Openbravo (open source ERP) have big followings in their home countries.
Onboard: Let The VAR Guy know how the Pentaho deployment works out. He’d love to hear all the details.
Onboard,
You mention cost savings. What product are you migrating away from? I’m curious to see which products Pentaho competes with.
Thanks,
Tristan
Tristan, we did not have another product in place. We considered Pentaho against a range of closed source BI products. A few of them are coming down from the enterprise and trying to service smaller businesses like ours. On licensing, deployment and ongoing consulting fees, we expect to save about $110,000 in first year deployment costs. That’s a conservative estimate.
What is the yearly license fee for the enterprise version..say for 4 cpus?
We are now using Pentaho with ramsetcube and freeanalisys, abandoning our old BI tools. We expect to save about $150,000.
Jack: Your story doesn’t surprise The VAR Guy. And ironically, our resident blogger will be speaking with Pentaho’s new channel chief within a week. Stay tuned.