Pentaho Briefing – Interesting BI / Integration Play

Earlier today, Saugatuck had an Analyst briefing with Pentaho – a BI / Integration company located in San Francisco, CA and Orlando, Florida. We walked away from the briefing with three key takeaways:

Speed and Cost — Pentaho’s open-source stack, and lightweight framework lend themselves readily to rapid deployment. They say that some of their Large Enterprise clients have gone from purchase to live-rollout in 6-8 weeks. This, along with their substantially lower cost (relative to proprietary approaches), has helped them beat out several larger BI competitors (primarily at a business unit-level) in recent deals.

BI and Integration together — Most traditional BI / Analytics vendors assume that they will operate only on pre-cleansed and arranged data. Pentaho’s system contains an integration platform (with a wide range of plug-ins) built-in so that DBAs / IT admins can bring together the important sources of data to simply a process that might typically involve more man-hours and multiple pieces of complicated software. This platform, couple’s with a large in-memory computing capability, not only speeds deployment, but the analysis itself.

OEM Go-to-Market — Pentaho is increasingly going to market with a focus on OEM sales, providing their BI / Analytics engine as a “white-label” plug-in for a wide range of SaaS vendors, such as Marketo. We think this is a sound strategy, and one which is likely to help them gain substantial market traction in the BI space. SaaS vendors are recognizing the need to provide improved BI / Analytics capabilities, and don’t generally have the resources or expertise to build an efficient and effective Integration platform with powerful analytics on their own.

Net — We are impressed by Pentaho’s understanding of the SaaS market and believe that their approach to selling both directly to end-user organizations and via channel / OEM partners is a viable model going forward. We are seeing a similar trend with a range of other fast growing players, especially in the BI market. Finding specific business process opportunities or beachheads via OEM relationships is a sound business strategy, especially if Pentaho can embed their solution not only into larger SaaS partners, but a variety of platform and aggregator channels as well.