Infobright, a open source data warehousing company, and Pentaho Corporation, a commercial open source alternative for business intelligence, have joined forces with Sun Microsystems to deliver a hardware and software solution that lowers the cost of entry and simplifies deployment of a powerful BI infrastructure.
The solution consists of either the Sun Fire X4275 storage server or Sun Storage 7310 Unified Storage System, Sun Open Network Systems, Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition, and Infobright's column-oriented analytic database, which is integrated with Sun's MySQL database and provides a low cost, self-managing and scalable database designed for BI. The combination of these products is intended to provide enterprises with a validated, end-to-end solution for BI that is fast, easy to implement and manage at low cost. It is suited for integrating online and offline data such as web analytics and customer information, to provide critical information needed to drive better business decisions.
The Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition provides comprehensive reporting, OLAP analysis, dashboards, data integration / ETL, data mining and a BI platform. Pentaho provides support, services, and product enhancements via an annual subscription. "We expect the BI suite to be adopted by customers in a wide variety of ways. Some customers utilize the entire suite including data integration, reporting, dashboards, analysis, and data mining. However, since the suite is modular and open, other customers deploy specific modules that meet a specific need they have in their BI stack," Lance Walter, vice president of marketing for Pentaho, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Infobright has developed a self-managing analytic database. The need for business intelligence, coupled with the dramatic growth of corporate data, has outpaced IT's resources and budget within many companies, according to InfoBright, whose technology seeks to solve this problem by delivering a highly scalable analytic database that reduces ongoing management costs.
For more information about Pentaho, go here. For more information about Infobright, go here. For more information about the Sun Microsystems components of the solution, go here.