Open Source Business Intelligence Scores Another Channel Win
May. 19th, 2009 by The VAR Guy
Forgive The VAR Guy if he sounds like Yogi Berra today, but our resident blogger has deja vu all over again. The reason: The folks at OpenBI, a systems integrator in Chicago, have scored yet another win promoting Pentaho’s open source business intelligence software to customers. This is becoming a familiar story for OpenBI and Pentaho’s channel. Here’s the scoop.
First, some caveats: The VAR Guy is not suggesting that open source will fully displace closed source in the IT channel. Thousands of resellers and integrators remain fiercely loyal to Microsoft- and Windows-centric solutions. And in fact, OpenBI’s latest open source victory apparently involves some Microsoft code.
Food for Thought
The OpenBI project involved The Swiss Colony, a mail-order catalog and online merchandising company. According to a Pentaho press release:
The Swiss Colony is using Pentaho to integrate massive amounts of clickstream data and web analytics to provide its marketing department greater visibility into valuable business metrics such as keyword optimization and ad spending. By marrying this information with traditional catalog sales activity data, The Swiss Colony now has a more complete view of its customers and is thus better equipped to serve their needs.
Sounds impressive. But this is more than an open source BI story. The deployment involved a mix of open source and closed source code. According to the press release, OpenBI’s solution “runs on Intel-based IBM servers using SUSE Linux, a Tomcat application server and a Microsoft SQL Server database.”
Hmmm. Since SQL Server is part of the solution, The VAR Guy assumes Windows Server is running somewhere in the mix as well. But he’ll check in with OpenBI for clarification.
Repeat Performance
OpenBI is making a name for itself deploying Pentaho-centric solutions for customers. The integrator in February 2009 deployed Pentaho’s software in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for a major customer project.
At the same time, Pentaho (and rival Jaspersoft) have been building out their respective partner programs and reseller channels. Both Pentaho and Jaspersoft landed on The Open Source 50, an annual report that identifies the most promising open source channel partner programs.
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Posted In: Open Source | Partner Programs
Tags: Amazon EC2 | Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud | Jaspersoft | Microsoft SQL Server | Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise | Open Source business intelligence | OpenBI | Pentaho | Pentaho Partner Program | The Open Source 50 | The Swiss Colony | Tomcat
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Tags: Amazon EC2 | Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud | Jaspersoft | Microsoft SQL Server | Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise | Open Source business intelligence | OpenBI | Pentaho | Pentaho Partner Program | The Open Source 50 | The Swiss Colony | Tomcat
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[...] to customers. This is becoming a familiar story for OpenBI and Pentaho’s partner channel. Here’s the scoop. Share and [...]
Thank you VAR Guy for your kind comments. OpenBI is very proud to work with The Swiss Colony and Pentaho to realize this success.
Your blog asked a question about the use of a Windows server. Yes, SQL Server is running on a Windows server. As stated in the press release, the Pentaho application server and ETL server are running on Linux. We use JDBC to connect to the SQL Server database.
Regards
Dave Reinke
Partner, OpenBI
Dave: No need to thank The VAR Guy. Our resident blogger strives to cover “what’s next” in the IT channel. OpenBI and Pentaho certainly fit that description. And the fact that OpenBI blends open source, Windows and cloud computing (in some cases) is critically important for readers to understand.
Too often, the IT media spends time hyping open source vs. closed source. Or on-premise vs. in-cloud. Those are pretty narrow views of the software market…
OpenBI did a great presentation to the Pentaho partner event about their experience deploying a BI pilot using EC2.
regards,
John Seyer
alliancecloud
[...] Open Source Business Intelligence Scores Another Channel Win openbiForgive The VAR Guy if he sounds like Yogi Berra today, but our resident blogger has deja vu all over again. The reason: The folks at OpenBI, a systems integrator in Chicago, have scored yet another win promoting Pentaho’s open source business intelligence software to customers. This is becoming a familiar story for OpenBI and Pentaho’s channel. Here’s the scoop. [...]
[...] Forgive The VAR Guy if he sounds like Yogi Berra today, but our resident blogger has deja vu all over again. The reason: The folks at OpenBI, a systems integrator in Chicago, have scored yet another win promoting Pentaho’s open source business intelligence software to customers. More » [...]