Pentaho Launches Gold Partner Program for Open Source BI

Pentaho, which specializes in commercial open source business intelligence (BI), has launched a formal Gold Reseller Program as part of a global push for the company. The VAR Guy is hardly surprised, given his ongoing dialog with Pentaho Channel Chief Lars Nordwall. Although details about the gold program are sketchy, Pentaho seems to be catching on with solutions providers.

Earlier this month, OpenBI — a solutions provider in Chicago — built a cloud-based BI system using Pentaho and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). And even before the gold-level reseller program launched, Pentaho was ranked 13 in The VAR Guy’s Open Source 50 report — which analyzes the most promising open source partner programs.

Now, Pentaho says its initial round of global Gold Partners includes:

On the upside, Gold Reseller status reflects an “expansion in a partner’s established relationship with Pentaho, having provided training or other services for Pentaho software and delivered client success to become Pentaho Gold Resellers,” according to a Pentaho release. But on the downside, the release doesn’t say much about what differentiates Gold-level resellers from traditional Pentaho partners.
Pentaho recruited SugarCRM veteran Lars Nordwall last year to build the company’s partner program. Pentaho isn’t alone in the open source BI market. Rival Jaspersoft was ranked number 5 in The Open Source 50.

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