Pentaho Open Source BI

Pentaho is a pioneer of Open Source BI software. Their offering was completed largely due to New Zealand based business and academic offerings - the Weka data mining and predictive analytics project developed by the Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis [WEKA] group at the University of Waikato in New Zealand.

The total Pentaho Solution package consists of:

• Mondrian - online analytical processing [OLAP] engine
• Pentaho Reporting Engine – open source reporting
• JFreeReport - Java reporting library
• Kettle - open source ETL project
• Weka - open source data mining. The Weka workbench contains a collection of visualization tools and algorithms for data analysis and predictive modelling, together with graphical user interfaces for easy access to this functionality
• Pentaho User Wizards - Developers can continue to use the stand-alone open source versions under the GNU general public license, however Pentaho customers prefer to access related open source projects from a single source – avoiding the need to have multiple streams of project lifetimes and license governing that project's IP.

Pentaho plans to incorporate the Weka functionality into its business intelligence software and create a commercial version of the product - Pentaho Data Mining.

Pentahos focus is on technologies that can "be used by the average human," according to CEO Richard Daley. This is achieved by adding wizards on top of XML interfaces.

Pentaho is aiming to work with partners to expand the Weka technology for use in specific industries including retail, finance and pharmaceuticals, and become "the dominant open-source [business intelligence] player.

Open source downloads of Pentaho are around 85,000 a month. The number of commercial customers is unknown.

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