Orlando, FL, August 31, 2009 -- Pentaho Corporation, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced Pentaho BI Suite Version 3.5, designed to provide an efficient and easy to use report authoring environment, technical and packaging changes to enable broad use of Pentaho for embedded BI by OEMs and SaaS providers, and a first-of-its-kind migration program to address customer demands to move away from proprietary BI solutions. The current economic climate has put even greater pressure on IT budgets with the need to do more with less, and this latest BI suite makes it easier than ever for enterprises that are frustrated by the cost and complexity of proprietary BI to turn to Pentaho as a proven alternative.

Pentaho BI Suite Version 3.5 includes a new Pentaho Report Designer that provides unmatched productivity for report authors as well as new self-service capabilities that empower business users to create new BI content in Pentaho Dashboard Designer.

Based on partner success and growing demand to embed BI into third-party applications for on-premise and SaaS deployment, Pentaho is now offering Pentaho Reporting Embedded Edition, which includes technology and documentation enhancements along with simplified royalty-free pricing for organizations that embed Pentaho.

With Pentaho BI Suite Version 3.5, Pentaho is now offering the Escape program, a fixed-price, fixed-deliverable service to convert reports from traditional proprietary BI tools to commercial open source BI from Pentaho for as little as $100 per report.

NEW FEATURES IN PENTAHO BI SUITE VERSION 3.5

Design: Pentaho BI Suite Version 3.5 includes a completely new, innovative Report Designer that provides report authors with valuable capabilities including a streamlined report design wizard, an interactive preview mode that lets authors view changes in real-time without toggling between design and preview modes, the ability to easily add dynamic, cascading parameters to reports in the designer, and more. And a new thin-client report viewer lets users change parameters, change output formats, or jump to a specific page while viewing reports.

Pentaho Dashboard Designer 3.5 builds on Pentaho’s self-service dashboard creation for business users by providing the ability to easily create new data and chart visualizations in Pentaho’s thin-client user console. Pentaho’s centralized metadata layer allows business users to query data in business terms without knowledge of underlying database structures or SQL.

Deploy: Based on proven partner success and growing demand to embed BI into third-party applications for on-premise and SaaS deployment, Pentaho is now offering Pentaho Reporting Embedded Edition. From a technical perspective, Pentaho Reporting Embedded Edition now incorporates all of the resources required by a report including query information, images, layout, and templates into a single file, simplifying deployment and maintenance. Pentaho is now offering unlimited-use pricing for OEMs who want to embed and distribute Pentaho BI, with low-cost, royalty-free pricing and no per-cpu, per-user, or per-customer fees. Pentaho now also provides an embedding guide with step-by-step instructions for embedded deployment.

Escape: Building on its public track record of successful customer migrations from proprietary BI solutions, Pentaho is now offering the Escape program to scale Pentaho’s migration capacity while reducing migration costs for customers. Starting at $5,000 for the first 25 reports, and for as little as $100 per report with larger volumes, Pentaho’s Escape program offers conversion from Actuate e.Reports, Brio, Cognos Impromptu, Crystal Reports, and Oracle Reports. Frustrated proprietary BI customers now have a proven, low-risk, low-cost path to commercial open source BI from Pentaho. Pentaho is also offering free 30-day evaluations of Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition Version 3.5, downloadable from the Pentaho website.

CUSTOMER QUOTES AND DETAILS

“We’re very impressed with the new report and dashboard design capabilities in Pentaho BI Suite 3.5,” said Noah Meister, vice president of Information Technology at Boyne Resorts. Boyne Resorts is the third largest resort network in the U.S., and switched to Pentaho from Crystal Reports. “The product has matured very rapidly over the last couple of releases thanks to the efforts of Pentaho and the Pentaho community.”

“We chose Pentaho’s open source offering over proprietary options years ago and we never looked back,” said Darrin Blocker, Decision Support Services at Loma Linda University Health Care. “Pentaho BI Suite Version 3.5 gives a lot of power and flexibility to our report authors, and our business users will appreciate the enhanced self-service capabilities.”

Prospective users are invited to test-drive Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition version 3.5 using a live interactive demonstration application, or by downloading a free 30-day evaluation, both available at www.pentaho.com. Both classroom and online training are available immediately for Pentaho BI Suite 3.5. Course and schedule details are available at http://www.pentaho.com/services/training/ .

Pentaho is offering a Techcast on Pentaho BI Suite 3.5 on September 15 at 2pm eastern. Register at http://www.pentaho.com/events/20090915-Pentaho-Version3-5/ .

About Pentaho Corporation

Pentaho Corporation is the commercial open source alternative for Business Intelligence (BI). Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition provides comprehensive reporting, OLAP analysis, dashboards, data integration / ETL, data mining and a BI platform that have made it the world’s leading and most widely deployed commercial open source BI suite. Pentaho provides support, services, and product enhancements via an annual subscription that can lower total cost of ownership by 90% compared to traditional, proprietary BI offerings. Since its 2004 founding as the pioneer in open source BI, Pentaho's products have been downloaded more than five million times, with production deployments at companies ranging from small organizations to The Global 2000. For more information, visit www.pentaho.com.