Pentaho Partner Program Info

Editor's Notes

• #5: Source: AMR Research – The Business Intelligence and Performance Management Spending Report, May 2008, No demographics provided
• #6: AMR BI User Survey, 2007 – demographics not disclosed Given that this data is 2007 – Cost of software has been a key barrier to BI expansion, and will almost certainly be MORE of a barrier as IT budgets tighten in light of global economic uncertainty
• #7: As an example of the inherent stability and viability of the open source model, the CIO of Deutsche Bank recently spoke about how his company was in the process of moving to open source for all software technology, as a “future proofing” exercise. In other words, he didn’t want his IT strategy to be compromised or constrained by the fact that Vendor A could acquire Vendor B, and force them down a different path. The open source model means that the users have full access to the source code, and there is a community of users that help drive the project, rather than being chained to one acquiring vendor’s agenda.
• #15: Pentaho’s Commercial open source business model differs in some fundamental ways from the traditional, proprietary software model, and brings together some of the best aspects from the traditional model with some of the advantages of open source software. Relative to the traditional model, we deliver a professional methodology to software development and support, and provide comprehensive support, consulting, and training to make sure you’re successful with our software. Where we’re very different from the traditional model is our cost and investment structure. Proprietary software companies have traditionally spent a huge portion of revenues from software license fees on sales and marketing. That means that roughly 42% of the fees that you pay as a customer go into activities that don’t give you any value as a customer. Pentaho’s Commercial open source model relies heavily on internet-based distribution, with far more investment going into R&D than the traditional model. From a customer perspective, that means investment of your dollars into new capabilities, ease of use, product quality, and more – things that provide value back to you. You’ll notice also that we have a blended model, where R&D is really a seamless extension of our support organization. We plan headcount and schedules in R&D with an allotment of 20% of engineering resource to work with our support organization, and in some cases to work directly with our customers. This ensures that you have access to the most capable technical resources, and that we can address any problem you encounter without the traditional “resource contention” of pulling developers off of new feature development to handle support escalations – it’s just built into our process. We also leverage a huge amount of community testing in the open source process – working with real data and real applications, on a huge variety of platforms, databases, and more. So we deliver products with higher quality, which allows us to spend more time on real support with customers, rather than just capturing and troubleshooting bugs that production customers find. Finally, there are two extremely customer-friendly aspects to our business model that are worth mentioning. We run our business very transparently – you can see our roadmaps, our documentation, see feedback from people in the community. It’s far more open than traditional models, giving you greater access, and likewise “keeps us honest” relative to our plans, our products, and our business. And because our business is built on subscription support, we don’t rely on a “product lock-in” strategy that ties you to our product and keeps you paying to get future releases. We have to re-earn your business every year by delivering great support. It means that our bests interests are very well-aligned with yours as a customer.
• #28: Source – Who’s Who in Open Source Business Intelligence, Apr. 2008
• #30: What makes the difference between success and failure in business intelligence or data warehousing projects? There is ample evidence from IT professionals, consultants, and industry analysts that success or failure with business intelligence is often driven far more by “people and process” issues rather than technology. Poor planning, lack of commitment, inadequate resources or skill sets, and inability to deliver initial results quickly can doom a BI project regardless of the selected software products and technology. While open source software is rapidly transforming the IT landscape and has provided new levels of flexibility and freedom for customers, open source software alone does not address the traditional pitfalls of BI projects. Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition provides the product capabilities and value-added services to help you deliver a successful BI project for your organization, including consultative support and product expertise, software maintenance, management and monitoring tools, and more.
• #31: Even large organizations have fewer IT resources than they would like, and they strive to get the most out of their investments in time, people, and technology. There are numerous public examples of Pentaho customers who have realized the TCO advantages of commercial open source BI from Pentaho, recognizing that investing in a relationship with Pentaho saves time, resources, and money not just in the long-term, but in the short term as they initiate BI projects. “Going it alone” with free BI software not only increases your risk of failure, it turns out to be more expensive. Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition delivers critical benefits like stabilized software, enhanced deployment capabilities, direct access to product expertise, and committed response times to help you save time, resources, and money.
• #32: Business intelligence risk comes in many shapes and forms. Risk of project failure, risk of late delivery, risk of going over budget, and legal risk as well. Beyond providing the software enhancements and services to reduce project risk, Pentaho provides a lower-cost model for enterprise-class business intelligence software that reduces budget risk by eliminating large, up-front software license fees. Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition also includes legal protection to minimize your company’s risk and exposure to potential legal issues related to intellectual property in open source software.
• #38: Through its experience developing Pentaho software and supporting thousands of deployments of Pentaho’s business intelligence software, the experts at Pentaho have gathered a wealth of knowledge spanning troubleshooting and configuration to best practices and migration considerations. As a Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition customer, this deep and valuable knowledge is made available to you in a number of ways, through dynamic and static content, as well as direct access to Pentaho experts to assist with specific tasks in your deployment. Consultative Support Every customer environment is unique, frequently incorporating a wide range of different platforms, data sources, and user requirements as well as unique content and system customization. Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition includes Consultative Support time, to give you one-on-one access to a Pentaho expert when working through situations that may be very unique to your configuration. This is built into Pentaho’s support processes. Rather than working through a series of related issues via back-and-forth, incident-by-incident calls, consultative support from Pentaho approaches these challenges holistically, saving you time and money through a focused conversation with a Pentaho expert to most efficiently apply our expertise and your time to resolve the overall issue. Remote Assistance Packages Pentaho offers a wide range of pre-defined remote assistance packages for common subjects like advanced configuration, tuning a report or data integration job, defining an Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) schema, and more. These fixed-time, fixed-objective packages can save your organization valuable time and enhance the results of your Pentaho deployment by avoiding many support calls, and not having to rely exclusively on documentation or online resources to take you step-by-step through a given procedure. See the grid on page 3 for information on available remote assistance packages by Edition. Web-based Training Pentaho Corporation has developed a comprehensive library of live and recorded web-based training sessions. This allows your organization to receive classroom-quality instruction, directly from Pentaho staff, in the convenience and comfort of your own office environment. Click here for training information from www.pentaho.com , and see the grid on page 3 of this document for information on web-based training availability by Edition.
• #39: Pentaho Knowledge Base (phase 1 October) The Pentaho Knowledge Base provides an online resource for self service troubleshooting and technical research. The Pentaho Knowledgebase is an organized, searchable collection of articles, professionally written by the experts at Pentaho. Professional Documentation Professional documentation is provided to make it fast and easy for you to get value from your Pentaho deployment. Pentaho’s documentation is updated regularly, integrates with the Pentaho Knowledge base, and covers a wide range of topics from introductory to advanced. Enterprise Edition Online Forum (phase 1 September) Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition customers also have access to a private forum exclusively for customers and partners using the Enterprise Edition. This forum augments the other Enterprise Edition support resources by offering a place to share experiences, ideas, and feedback with other Enterprise Edition users.