OTOinsights

Pentaho BI Open Source Solution Continues to Grow

Since 2002, a group of executives from companies including Hyperion, SAS and Cognos have been developing a series of interoperable open source packages that provide a full range of Business Intelligence (BI) offerings.  As of November, SourceForge.net reports over 500,000 downloads of Pentaho's software from their servers alone, and Pentaho estimates over 2.5 million total downloads in the past 2 years which may not seem like a large number in the grand scheme of things, but is akin to a landslide when compared to the number of operational licenses sold and managed by the proprietary BI players. 

In 2006, Pentaho was named to Red Herring's list of 100 privately held North American companies that are innovating the technology landscape.  They also made the Red Herring 'Open Source 20' list in August and were highlighted as the most popular open source BI suite by Intelligent Enterprise magazine. 

Also launched this year was Pentaho's Partner Program, with nearly 30 implementation and hosting companies already signed up.  They also formally joined IBM's partner program in October and partnered to demonstrate a join IBM/Pentaho solution at the "Information On Demand" conference. 

Press has been very favorable, including clips such as:

"Pentaho is well-positioned for the high-growth performance management market, which is poised to reach $23 billion this year. Some important wins include Abbott Labs, Divx, and Orbitz. To compete in a market of very big players, Pentaho will have to continue to snag large customers, but Chairman Andre Boisvert, an enterprise software veteran, can open a lot of doors for this fledgling." Source - Red Herring August, 2006

"After a lengthy development, and some initial market skepticism, Pentaho BI certainly seems to be gaining steam and followers. It's already listed as one of the top one hundred projects hosted on the Sourceforge.net nexus, a website that lists around 120,000 open source projects. The ranking is based on the number of downloads and activity." Source - Computer Business Review Online April, 2006

Pentaho has also made numerous enhancements and additions to their suite this year including integration with Google Maps for enhanced geographic analytics, rollout of Mondrian 2.2 including a wizard-driven business cube creation engine, and acquisition/integration of the Weka open source project which adds a rich new layer of data mining offerings developed by the University of Waikato in New Zealand.

To learn more about Pentaho's free* suite of products, check out their website.    

*Software is free, licensing for professional use will run $20k-50k which is 10% of the fees for the bigger proprietary players

Five Corporate Blogging Success Factors

Dr Walter Carl, the students in his Advanced Organizational Communication class (Spring 2006) at Northeastern University and John Cass and his colleagues at Backbone Media, recently published a research paper that seeks to uncover reasons, conditions, and factors that make a corporate blog successful. 

The research team interviewed twenty corporate bloggers from companies of varied size and industry, and asked each blogger a series of standardized questions.   After careful review, the research team identified five factors for a blog's success:
1. Culture
2. Transparency
3. Time
4. Dialogue
5. Entertaining Writing Style and Personalization

Sneak Preview of OTOman

Coming soon to a MITX Awards Ceremony near you, catch this sneak preview of OTOman!
(click on graphic below to launch movie)

 

New ThinkDesktop Microsite

OTOlabs has launched a new microsite where both the OTOlabs.com and Adtoolsinc.com domains will drive traffic.  This is the first phase in a larger site effort for the ThinkDesktop brand and One to One Interactive's technology business unit OTOlabs.