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Giving Away A Great Product To Make Money – Pentaho

June 28, 2007 - Filed under: Information — Tags: , ,

Here’s a great example of giving away a great product to make money. Pentaho is an open source business intelligence application and if you are thinking about buying new software for your business you need to check this out. It’s free and they have some great demos available.

According to Wikipedia business intelligence (BI) is a business management term, which refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information about company operations. Business intelligence systems can help companies have a more comprehensive knowledge of the factors affecting their business, such as metrics on sales, production, internal operations, and they can help companies to make better business decisions.

Pentaho is a complete business intelligence platform that includes reporting, analysis (OLAP), dashboards, data mining and data integration (ETL). Use it as a full suite or as individual components that are accessible via web services.

This looks like a wonderful application for almost any business. It’s free to download and it’s a very fast install. It’s still seems a little unfriendly, but growing more user friendly by leaps and bounds. It now looks like the next OpenOffice release to include Pentaho BI as well. Pentaho’s reporting engine, Pentaho Reporting, will be integrated with the next release of OpenOffice.org, version 2.3, which is due out in the second half of this year, according to Lance Walter, vice president of marketing at Pentaho.

How are they going to make money with it, you ask?

The answer is Training! They charge for training.

This is the great thing about Open Source. They are giving away a great product that won’t lock you in to any one vendor and will provide you with free updates to keep your installation current and secure. The best part is that the business only has to buy as much training as they actually need.

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2 Comments »

  1. Hi Jim,

    Thanks for writing about Pentaho. This is a quick post to provide a little bit of clarification about Pentaho’s business model. Without turning a “comment” into a “brochure” – always a temptation for us marketing types 😉 – here it is in a nutshell.

    We charge for training as you mentioned. We also offer a Pentaho Subscription (either for an individual module like data integration/kettle, or for the whole suite), and that subscription includes telephone support, IP indemnification, certified versions (really just goes “hand in hand” with support). Finally, depending on the module, we also offer some additional features (Single Sign-on integration being an example) as part of the subscription.

    -Lance
    Pentaho
    http://www.pentaho.org

    Comment by Lance Walter — June 28, 2007 @ 12:24 pm

  2. […] It Worth It To Give Away Information?” and I have written several posts about this before. Here and here are just a […]

    Pingback by Lillicotch.com » Giving Free Stuff Can Help You Make Money — June 10, 2008 @ 7:02 am

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