(03/08/07) So here's my Pentaho story. I caught onto the whole Pentaho thing last year when I was browsing through online articles from Intelligent Enterprise. Speaking of Intelligent Enterprise, there is an article that the commercial BI software field just got smaller with Oracle's acquisition of Hyperion. I came from Sagent. It's a really great BI tool with end to end ETL and Reporting with an o so intuitive user interface. If you ask me, it was ahead of its time. Just like the other winning platforms I've backed and bled for like the TRS-80 and the Commodore Amiga. But I digress. When I got to playing with Pentaho, I noticed a few familiar names on the executive team because they came from Sagent after that company had been gutted and sold to Group1 who later got bought by Pitney Bowes. The vision for Pentaho is along similar lines to Sagent but includes better cube technology and data mining capabilities. My first approach was to pitch Pentaho as a replacement for Sagent at my e-commerce job. Sagent was not delivering the reporting capabilities and delivery options that our users were clamoring for. My pitch was interupted by an avalanche of work. I got a little stuck in the avalanche and ended up leaving the company before I could get Pentaho in the door. I continued to play with Pentaho more. My next exercise was to use Pentaho to build a prototype energy market analytics solution. My customer emphasized adhoc cube slice and dice. Luckily there were some examples of this in the demo. I started hacking away and managed to build a sample cube. Unfortunately, there was a learning curve and a lot of manual hacking to get the cube working and that made my customer uncomfortable. We ended up evaluating on a tool called StrategyCompanion instead. It's a pretty decent tool. I put Pentaho on the back burner. I decided to add Pentaho to my profile on Rentacoder. I was found by a young man who read about Pentaho and whose family had a small IT shop in my area. They were working on a school safety project that needed an analytics engine. There shop was a SQL Server shop but I talked them through the pros and cons of Open Source vs Microsoft. I made the argument that there was more platform flexibility with Pentaho. I also pointed out that although Microsoft was cheap, it wasn't free and that it had taken them 5 years to get to a major iteration of their SQL Server platform. It's the same argument Apple uses when comparing their multiple iterations of OS X to the slow pace Microsoft took to go from WIndows XP/2003 to Vista. I mentioned that Pentaho had grown leaps and bounds in only the short time I had been following them. Since I had a consulting gig, I told them I couldn't offer a lot of hours. They were ok with that and off I started to build the analytics side as they continued with the transactional side of a school safety solution. Currently, I've put together some dummy data, l loaded it with Kettle, and built a sample report that could be run from the sample portal Pentaho provides. Now, I've read through their whitepaper on building location intelligence applications with Pentaho and GoogleMaps and I'm trying to build something of this nature for the sample data I have. I'm keeping a developers notebook of the whole experience and I will use this blog to post articles that will move others along the Pentaho road from the perspective of prototyping,developing, and deploying an analytics application for a define subject area and user. I'm also throwing in a Agile Development with SCRUM as an added bonus. I've broken up work to date and future work into 30 day project backlogs (lists of tasks that should take me 30 days given my full time consulting work on Pentaho for a few hours a week constraints). Stay tuned. I hope this blog gets some readership. I'll post my notes to date over the weekend. If this works out, I hope to build a practice building open source BI solutions. Pentaho has a partnership track whose bottom rung I can afford if it would keep me in business in the local Philly/NJ/NY/DE/DC area. Hopefully I can find companies in the area looking for an alternative to billion dollar companies with bloated solutions. I have two words to say to those big BI guys as I love supporting the underdog: Bring It!