Orlando, Fla., March 31, 2010 -- Pentaho Corporation, the open source business intelligence (BI) leader, today announced the preview of Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) 4.0, the next major product milestone in the company’s Agile BI initiative, announced in November. PDI 4.0 is the world’s first fully unified ETL, modeling and data visualization IDE for BI applications. With Pentaho’s Agile BI initiative, organizations can confidently build BI applications more quickly, adapt to changing business requirements more easily and achieve faster time-to-value at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions.

Pentaho is delivering a radically different, integrated environment that collapses all of the steps from data integration and data modeling through end user visualization, so developers and business users can work side by side and build and deploy BI applications in minutes or hours rather than weeks or months. In addition, this major release of PDI includes application-wide usability enhancements as well as improvements in functionality for business and enterprise deployments including security and team development, so both novice and expert BI professionals and end users can work closely together to rapidly deliver and use rich BI applications.

Combined with the risk free and low cost commercial open source business model that Pentaho employs, Pentaho’s Agile BI sets the standard for the rest of the industry to follow.

NEWS SUMMARY

Most proprietary ETL and BI software solutions are expensive and difficult to implement, as business needs change and grow. They require highly trained and costly experts yet still have high risks of failure due to unmet end user needs.

Traditional BI technologies are complex and confusing for end users, making it difficult for them to participate fully in project development. To overcome these challenges, Pentaho’s Agile BI initiative, with PDI 4.0 at its core, collapses the analytic data supply chain by reducing the number of development steps before results can be visualized, improving the collaboration between developer and end user, speeding time to value. Pentaho Data Integration 4.0 provides the world’s first unified ETL, modeling and data visualization development environment. PDI 4.0 enables teams of technical and business users to work interactively together in a single environment to design, automatically model and visualize fully vetted data integration and business intelligence applications in a fraction of the time of other solutions. To view the full list of benefits and features in PDI 4.0, please visit www.pentaho.com/pdi_4

Pentaho Data Integration Enterprise Edition 4.0 includes enhanced security, team collaboration features, content versioning, robust repository, and integrated scheduling capabilities to coordinate ETL activities.

Organizations can deploy Pentaho Agile BI on-premise or in the cloud, enabling users to choose the deployment method that best suits their needs.

Pentaho will host a webcast with industry analyst Mark Smith of Ventana Research on Wednesday, March 31 at 2:00 p.m. ET on the current challenges of building traditional BI applications and how Pentaho’s Agile BI plays a critical role in deploying useful, pervasive business intelligence applications. To register, please visit Pentaho Defines a Better Way to Build BI Solutions.

QUOTES AND DETAILS

“The data integration and business intelligence market has looked for a core advance in how projects get done for many years. The unification of the key distinct development environments into a unified development environment for BI that Pentaho provides with its Agile BI initiative is a leap forward for the industry, and I expect businesses will be able to dramatically reduce the time it takes for them to create and update BI applications.” - Mark Smith, president of Ventana Research, a research and business technology advisory services firm

“Open-source BI tools are not only the default option for cash-strapped organizations, but they are becoming more of a mainstream deployment option for all kinds of BI usage. While functionally is not yet on a par with the large commercial BI platforms, and still rarely seen as an enterprisewide BI standard, open-source BI tool deployment is growing solidly.” Moreover, “the provided statistics from the vendors and also Gartner's inquiry request statistics about open-source BI clearly indicate that deployments are on a sharp rise and Gartner believes that the number of production deployments of customers using subscription fees are likely to grow five-fold until 2012. “ - Andreas Bitterer, Research VP at Gartner Research in the report Open-Source Business Intelligence Tools Production Deployments Will Grow Five-Fold through 2012, October 2009

“Pentaho’s commercial open source business intelligence model combined with our Agile BI technology innovation is revolutionizing the business intelligence market for the good of the technical and end users. By making collaboration between developers and end users seamless and affordable, we are commoditizing BI so companies can achieve success quickly, without the risk of costly investments. Welcome to the future of BI.” - Richard Daley, founder and CEO of Pentaho

See what others are saying about Pentaho’s Agile BI initiative.

MULTIMEDIA CONTENT

View a video interview with Matt Casters, Pentaho’s Chief Architect for Data Integration and Founder of the Kettle open source project

View a demonstration of PDI 4.0 hosted by Pentaho CTO James Dixon

Register for the webinar Pentaho Defines a Better Way to Build BI Solutions taking place Wednesday, March 31 at 2:00 p.m. ET

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.