Commentary on Pentaho’s Grudge Match Presentation
Post 3 in a series of 4, in which I share my thoughts on how our vendors did at the BI Tool Vendor Grudge Match last week, and on the details of their presentations. You might also check out my summary post a couple weeks ago on PBI.
Company: Pentaho
Presenter: Lance Walter, VP, Marketing
At Pentaho: 4 years
In BI: 19 years
Gift selected: Capstone Bag
Pentaho has existed for 5 yrs. Lance was VP of Product Marketing for BusinessObjects before Pentaho. Before that at Siebel, Hyperion, and Oracle.
Pentaho is an open source solution to BI. Lance touted the depth and breadth of the team assembled at Pentaho from many other BI companies with many years experience, talking a bit about awards for Pentaho and their customers.
He mentioned that it was important to focus on what it means to be successful in BI and cited slides from TDWI, but didn’t really spell much out. He did admit that a single tool isn’t going to be a silver bullet. He said, “You can succeed or fail with any tool.” Kudos! Love that honesty.
Lance’s “angle” (his word) is that Pentaho requires very little investment (being pretty much free and all), so return is easy to come by.
Pentaho spends a lot of time handling in-bound sales calls and little on marketing and pursuing out-bound sales. Interesting.
Lance sees a lot of “requirements distortion” in other vendors’ proposals. He feels many other vendors view their solution as a hammer, so every problem becomes a nail. I think there’s a certain amount of truth to that. But he did little to differentiate why Pentaho was different other than just saying it is.
Open Source TCO is often assumed / rumored to be very high, This is because in the old days there was no single throat to choke, no accountability, few standards, etc. Many of these risks have been fairly well mitigated. Pentaho’s for-profit corporate umbrella and support contracts serve to significantly address these concerns. I, for one, am far less leery about leveraging the Linux’s, Pentaho’s and MySQL’s of the world now than I was 10 or even 5 years ago. Lance made this case with a story that demonstrated how little evidence there is remaining to make this kind of high TCO case against Pentaho. All good, and I think his story is telling.
Of course he highlighted the strength of having an open-source community continually working on improving their software. And I do think that’s a strength, especially given that Pentaho is managing/prioritizing requirements, performing quality control, and leading (supplementing) the community with paid on-staff development teams. Plus, when the community submits code back to Pentaho, then Pentaho is on the hook to support it, maintain it, update it, etc. Very beneficial symbiosis.
“IDC has talked about how open source is the most significant IT trend in the last 20 years … bigger than client-server, bigger than thin-client applications, etc.” I gotta say, I’m not sure I buy that. But whatever. I put only limited stock in the analysts and the pundits anyway.
Gartner found that Pentaho customers rated them very highly for customer satisfaction. Impressive, and flies in the face of the old perspective of open-source as “built in someone’s garage.”
Gartner also has evidently validated the Pentaho model as a good strategy for penetrating a market that’s continually trying to decrease TCO.
Lance touted the interoperability of Pentaho’s tool suite with other vendor’s tools. This is great. I’m all for primary integration at the data warehouse level, not at the presentation tool level. However, there’s a real concrete cost to having multiple tools in-house. Many companies have a hard time getting their people up to speed on one tool, let alone two.
I thought the most devastating blow he landed on the competition, though, was when he talked about how the customers of other vendors would receive maintenance invoices for the coming year and suddenly be highly motivated to consider Pentaho as a potential replacement to the systems they have in-house. Obviously, there would be much more involved in that kind of switch than just deciding to pay a bill or not, but it does give you pause … as well it should the big “expensive” vendors.
Overall, I grade this presentation: A-
Part 1 of 2:
Part 2 of 2:
