Pentaho Announces Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.2; New Release Adds Report Templates, Drag & Drop BI Workflows & More

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 16, 2006--Pentaho Corp., creator of the world's most popular open source business intelligence (BI) suite, today announced the near-term availability of Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.2, which offers significant ease-of-use enhancements and the broadest open source BI offering available. Upgrades include report templates, new chart types, drag-and-drop BI workflows, and a variety of enhancements to increase administrator productivity.

This release expands on the capabilities that Pentaho introduced in version 1.0 in December of 2005 as the first credible open source alternative to proprietary BI suites. The broad functionality, flexible architecture and open source model of the Pentaho suite have attracted a worldwide user base and community and made it the world's most popular open source BI suite.

Enhancements to Pentaho Report Designer

In Pentaho Open Suite BI 1.2, the graphical drag-and-drop Pentaho Report Designer adds a series of report templates that make it easy for organizations to create and reuse a standard library of sales, financial, HR or other reports. The new release also offers additional chart types, created and contributed by Pentaho's vibrant open source community. The updated release also includes a tree display of each report showing all report objects, an interactive property editor, multi-selection and editing of objects, subtotals, conditional formatting, and other capabilities that make it easy to quickly create sophisticated, visually rich reports. Together, these capabilities expand the market for open source BI, and make Pentaho's best-in-class BI capabilities accessible to a much larger audience.

"We're very pleased with the capabilities of Pentaho Report Designer," said Bryan Senseman, CTO, of OpenBI. "The addition of Pentaho's Report Designer greatly simplifies report design and development tasks and makes Pentaho's market-leading open source BI platform even more accessible to mainstream BI implementers and users."

Enhancements to Pentaho Design Studio

Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.2 contains numerous enhancements to the Pentaho Design Studio, where administrators create and maintain BI applications. The user interface has been streamlined and now supports drag-and-drop creation of BI workflows with a new design panel that provides a graphical, flowchart-style view of BI workflows, including report bursting, business logic and more.

To enhance administrator productivity, Pentaho Design Studio has also added an embedded report design wizard that allows administrators to create reports without leaving the Design Studio; integration with Pentaho Data Integration to allow administrators to define or edit data transformations within the same interface; and a new embedded preview capability for fast and easy validation of changes to BI applications.

The Broadest Offering in Open Source BI

Pentaho Open Suite BI is designed to help organizations gain an integrated view of valuable business information that is scattered across disparate applications and databases, whether related to customer service, sales performance, internal efficiency or global performance. Since Pentaho 1.0, Pentaho has added best-in-class data integration capabilities covering extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) as well as enterprise information integration (EII) to consolidate the information in these data silos. This provides flexibility for large-scale batch updates or on-demand integration of data while also allowing Pentaho to address a wide range of user challenges.

"Our research shows that having a complete BI offering is the most valuable feature in an open source BI offering," said Dan Everett, Research Director at Ventana Research. "Users are clearly looking for more than just reporting in open source BI offerings."

The Pentaho suite also provides the broadest and deepest offering available in open source business intelligence, spanning reporting, analysis, dashboards, BI platform, data integration, and more, with a flexible, modular architecture that allows users to leverage only the functionality they need. Organizations that only need to embed reporting in their departmental applications, for example, can deploy Pentaho Reporting in an embedded scenario without any other components of the Pentaho Open BI Suite. Organizations that need to address a critical data integration problem can use Pentaho Data Integration without any other Pentaho components.

"Our Pentaho suite continues to evolve at a pace that could never have been achieved without a community-based development and distribution model, and Pentaho 1.2 offers significant enhancements for our community, customers and partners," said Richard Daley, CEO of Pentaho. "This release sets a new standard for ease of use, breadth, and flexibility in open source BI."

Availability

Development builds of Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.2 are currently available to the community at www.pentaho.org/downloads. General Availability with full testing and validation is planned for September. For more information, visit www.pentaho.org.

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, and Kettle, 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.