Pentaho, creator of open source business intelligence (BI) suite, celebrates its second anniversary with over 1.5 million downloads since the inception of the company, recent selection as SourceForge.net Project of The Month for October, and recognition by Forbes magazine as a “revolutionary” in the software industry. In only two years, Pentaho and the Pentaho community have redefined and expanded the BI industry with a professional open source business model that addresses the need for reporting, analysis, dashboards, data mining and data integration without the expense and shortcomings of proprietary BI solutions.

“Pentaho is clearly changing the landscape of BI by empowering organizations to escape the legacy technology, complex upgrade cycles, and expense of proprietary BI,” said Richard Daley, Founder and CEO of Pentaho. “For the first time, businesses have a comprehensive, standards-based BI alternative that makes it possible to use all of their information assets effectively with no software license fees.”

Before Pentaho launched its open source BI platform, all BI software providers followed a traditional proprietary model that locked customers into high upfront costs and license fees as well as expensive, inflexible and long upgrade cycles. In addition, the monolithic architectures and named-user, role-based licensing models of proprietary BI software created significant barriers to large-scale deployments designed to bring BI capabilities to front-line employees.

Pentaho has addressed these problems by offering an integrated, open, easy-to-use BI suite that can be deployed on a modular basis, is continuously and non-disruptively upgraded, and was architected for easy integration with operational applications in order to provide full access to BI capabilities to users at all levels of an organization. Pentaho components can be deployed as embedded services within applications or as a self-contained end user BI environment, while the professional open source model and standards support dramatically reduce the total cost of ownership.

“Before we introduced our open BI suite, many organizations were unable to fully leverage the information in their various databases because of the high cost, complexity and difficulty of deploying proprietary BI software,” said James Dixon, Founder and CTO of Pentaho. “We have completely changed the paradigm in just two years, and we continue to build on that foundation to help businesses become more efficient and profitable.”