The business intelligence software market is all about enabling
business users to make sense of their data. But sometimes the data's complexity can make it a daunting task.
Open source BI
vendor Pentaho claims it has a solution in the new Pentaho Business Intelligence 1.6, which provides a semantic metadata layer.
"Pentaho has been marching down the path of making open source business
intelligence easier to use," Lance Walter, vice president of marketing at
Pentaho, told InternetNews.com. "The latest release is a
critical next step in that it adds an open source business intelligence
metadata layer that lets users build reports with terms like 'customers,'
'products' and 'sales' and insulates them from the underlying database
structure and schema."
Walter said that the BI metadata layer is centrally maintained by an
administrator that can create a map of terms. Those terms are then served up
to users in an AJAX-based thin-client interface so they can
self-serve and create their own reports.
"People do describe the metadata layer as a semantic layer," Walter noted.
"It is a logical model that sits on top of what could be a very complex
database schema and exposes it very simply."
Metadata is exposed via XML (define) using the Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM), an open-industry standard format for the expression of metadata that Informatica, Business Objects and others already support in their BI tools. Walter said that Pentaho is built natively around the CWM, so it would be easy for customers to integrate with metadata they may already have in other tools.
Pentaho spent a lot of time looking at where other BI solutions had failed
with their metadata implementation in order to make sure that Pentaho didn't
make the same mistakes, he added.
The standards-based approach is one that so far is serving Pentaho well and
is why it isn't part of the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), an effort that aims to make open source
solutions interoperate with each other. Open source BI vendor Jaspersoft
plays a large role in the organization.
"We don't see membership in any particular body as a key driver or enabler
for integration," Walter said. "We prioritize integration and certification
based on market demand and not so much on who showed up for a meeting."
Beyond using open standards, which proprietary vendors may also use, open source is the key differentiator for Pentaho and one that Walter
said mitigates risks for users. SAP's acquisition of Business Objects this week highlights the risk in proprietary solutions.
The risk comes in the form of closed proprietary code that users cannot
maintain in the event a proprietary vendor abandons the code. When a
proprietary vendor is acquired, there is always the risk of forced migrations
and licensing changes.
"The open source model naturally and intrinsically insulates people from
that," Walter argued. "It is possible that Pentaho could be acquired, but our
source code is out there and free and customers can keep using it."
 Barry Klawans, CTO, JasperSoft
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