Fortune 50 Discovers Pentaho, Open Source Business Intelligence Software

The Global 2000 is nice. The Fortune 500 is very nice. But selling into the Fortune 50 — especially for a small open source company like Pentaho — is extra sweet. Pentaho, which recently launched version 2.0 of its open source business intelligence software, says it has won business with several Fortune 50 companies. And Pentaho’s partner network is expanding. Here’s the scoop.

Sure, traditional BI companies continue to perform well. Earlier this year, The VAR Guy moderated a few CIO-focused conferences for the SAS Institute — one of the largest privately held software companies in the world. Over and over again, CIOs described how they leverage SAS’s BI and business analytics software to plan marketing and promotion efforts.

Still, there is a market void here. Open source companies like Pentaho and Jaspersoft  are seeking to disrupt the traditional BI market by providing easier-to-deploy, lower-cost solutions to channel partners and customers.

One impressed customer, a European retailer, recently placed a $1 million order for Pentaho after a successful pilot engagement, Pentaho claims. Other recent adopters include ZipRealty, Mozilla and Delta Dental of Virginia. Recent Pentaho partners include Hewlett-Packard, Infobright, MySQL, Openbravo, Red Hat, SGI, Sun, Unisys and Vertica.

Somewhere in the list of companies above, Pentaho claims, there lurks a few Fortune 50 companies running Pentaho. Oh, and Pentaho does have a growing list of resellers and integrators.

That’s right: Open source BI is a channel play, folks.

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