Pentaho Acquires Weka Project

World's Most Popular Open Source BI Suite Adds Best-in-Class Open Source Data Mining and Predictive Analytics

Orlando FL. - Sept. 19, 2006 - Pentaho Corp., creator of the world's most popular open source business intelligence (BI) suite, today announced that it has acquired the Weka open source data mining project developed by the University of Waikato in New Zealand. Weka's advanced analytics equip users with the tools to identify complex patterns, associations and correlations that are critical to evaluating business performance and supporting strategic planning initiatives, particularly in consumer-driven industries such as retail, financial services, communications and consumer packaged goods.

Effective immediately, the Weka project is downloadable from www.pentaho.com/download/ as well as from www.sourceforge.net under the GNU General Public License. In addition, Pentaho has launched the first-ever live forum for interaction among Weka project community members at http://community.pentaho.com and has updated its own Data Mining technical forum on www.pentaho.com to support Weka users.

The Pentaho and Weka teams will soon announce a road map covering their plans for enhancements including extension of Weka's analytic techniques to additional vertical industries, and integration of Weka with Pentaho's platform, data integration, and information delivery capabilities.

"Through the acquisition of the Weka project, Pentaho continues to show that there is no capability or application in the business intelligence market that can't or won't be addressed by the open source community," said Andre Boisvert, Chairman and co-founder of Pentaho. "This latest acquisition provides our partners and customers with a broad, yet modular solution to address a full spectrum of business problems from historical reporting and analysis, to data integration, to advanced analytics and now data mining. Having served as the former President & COO of SAS Institute Inc, the world's leading proprietary data mining software vendor, I have a good appreciation for what an excellent product the Weka project has produced. Though both SAS and Weka originated in acadamia, I believe that Weka will ultimately become the de facto standard due to the fact that it is open source and that is has a very vibrant, world wide community behind the project"

Originally created in 1993, and available on sourceforge.net since 2000, the Weka project was established by the University of Waikato as a platform for the research and testing of advanced machine learning techniques. Since then, Weka has developed a large and loyal following in both academic and industry circles, and has been downloaded more than 600,000 times. The Weka project is now so popular that it has spawned more than two dozen extension projects, tailoring and extending Weka's powerful analytical techniques with advanced visualization, industry-specific algorithms, and more.

Organizations use Weka's data mining tools to understand relationships between internal factors like price, product placement, or staff skills as well as external factors like economic indicators, competition, and target market demographics; analyze the impact of potential changes to critical business metrics like sales volumes, customer loyalty, and profitability; and perform business-critical calculations such as market-basket analysis, customer segmentation, pricing optimization and fraud detection.

"This combination makes a lot of sense, for organizations that want a comprehensive BI platform" said Dan Everett, Research Director at Ventana Research. "Recent research from Ventana shows that organizations view data mining as one of the top 5 most important BI platform capabilities, and data mining plays a critical role in the optimization process of the Ventana Research PerformanceCycle ™ methodology of 'Understand, Optimize, Align'."

Pentaho's acquisition of the Weka project is the latest chapter in a series of initiatives designed to accelerate the development of best-in-class, integrated open source BI projects. Pentaho previously integrated the JFreeReport reporting, Mondrian OLAP and Kettle data integration projects with the Pentaho open source BI platform, and also delivered functional enhancements to those projects.

"This move comes at just the right time for our research group," said Mark Hall, Senior Lecturer and core Weka developer at Waikato University. "The popularity of Weka has grown to the point where it needs support from a larger open source community with the resources to invest in it. Pentaho will provide a great environment for further growth and development of the Weka project."

About Pentaho

Pentaho provides a full spectrum of open source 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 an open source business model. Pentaho is the primary sponsor and owner of popular open source projects including Mondrian, JFreeReport, Kettle, 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.

For more information on Pentaho: Pentaho's web site is located at www.pentaho.com