Pentaho Releases Major Update to Commercial Open Source Business Intelligence Suite for On-Premise and Cloud BI

Pentaho BI Suite Version 3 Sets the Standard for Easy to Use Dashboards, Convenient Deployment Options, and Low Cost, Community-Powered BI

Orlando, FL – March 23, 2009

NEWS SUMMARY

• Pentaho Corporation, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced Pentaho BI Suite Version 3, aimed at making it cost effective for businesses to deploy easy-to-use, robust BI capabilities to users throughout the organization.
• Pentaho BI Suite Version 3 allows business users to easily create interactive dashboards — including Adobe Flash-based visualizations — without training.
• Based on existing customer successes and growing customer demand, Pentaho is introducing a Cloud Computing Edition, packaged for deployment on the Amazon EC2 Cloud, providing companies with another way to drive down the cost of bringing BI into their organizations.
• A thriving and evolving Pentaho community, empowered by a new plug-in framework, is enabling rapid delivery of significant new product features.
• Pentaho is also offering free 30-day evaluations of Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition Version 3, downloadable from the Pentaho website.

NEW FEATURES IN PENTAHO BI SUITE VERSION 3

• New For Business Users: With Version 3, Pentaho has added an easy-to-use, web-based graphical dashboard designer requiring no training for business users, who can easily define personalized, interactive dashboards, including Adobe Flash-based visualizations, using theme-based templates. The dashboards can incorporate reports, analysis views and other Pentaho content, along with filter controls that synchronize dashboard content based on user selections for time periods, product lines, regions, and more. A demonstration of the new dashboard capabilities is available on the Pentaho site.
• New For IT Users: Pentaho BI Suite Cloud Computing Edition is packaged for deployment in Cloud computing environments and will be delivered as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for deployment on Amazon EC2, so costs scale with usage, avoiding the onerous named-user, perpetual licensing structures of traditional BI packages. Cloud BI brings many of the benefits of software as a service (SaaS) to custom BI applications, including lower up-front costs and simplified infrastructure management. The new delivery model builds on the traction Pentaho has already established in Cloud business intelligence deployments with clients like Nutricia.
• New For Community Contributors: Pentaho BI Suite Version 3 includes a new plug-in framework that allows community members, OEMs and system integrators to easily drop in extensions and other contributions. The plug-in architecture handles integration points, including menus and toolbars, registering new content types, repository integration and content browsing, and physical deployment within web and application servers.

QUOTES AND CUSTOMER DETAILS

• "The new dashboard design capabilities in Pentaho BI Suite Version 3 will provide immediate benefit by letting our business users pull together existing BI content and easily create a comprehensive view of the information they need most. Pentaho Version 3 delivers a solid foundation for intuitive, self-service dashboard creation, and we're excited about the rapid evolution that Pentaho's community-enabled model continues to deliver." -- Peter Schmidt, Director of Business Intelligence at Centro.
• "Open source can provide a great path to help IT reduce the cost and complexity of delivering enterprise business intelligence. Open source BI technologies like Pentaho BI Suite Version 3 can help reduce costs while operating across a wide range of computing platforms and analytic or relational databases. In today's economic climate, organizations who aren't evaluating open source alternatives are putting critical IT dollars at risk."-- Mark Smith, CEO and EVP of Ventana Research.
• "Pentaho's community-enabled business model has made it possible to accelerate our development cycle and put our game-changing 3.0 version in the hands of our customers in only eight months. Pentaho is writing the book on cost effective, easy to use, comprehensive BI. Whether on-premise or in the cloud, Pentaho Version 3 is enabling companies to rapidly increase efficiency and agility at a time when every dollar counts." -- Richard Daley, founder and CEO of Pentaho.
• "Pentaho BI Suite Version 3 marks a new step in community cooperation. The Community Dashboard Framework team is very proud of its contribution to Pentaho Dashboards. From a technical and organizational perspective, Pentaho has been very supportive of our efforts and continues to make it easier and easier for us to enhance these great products." -- Pedro Alves, Director at Webdetails and Pentaho Community Contributor

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