Pentaho Adds Reporting Solution to OpenOffice.org

Pentaho Corp ., creator of the world's most popular open source business intelligence (BI) suite, in cooperation with Sun Microsystems , today announced plans to integrate Pentaho's reporting engine into future releases of the OpenOffice.org suite. The enhancement, planned to be available with OpenOffice.org 2.3, will equip OpenOffice.org users with key desktop applications, reporting and database connectivity in a single platform. Sun Microsystems, who in 2000 founded OpenOffice.org, an open source project, has worked with Pentaho to enhance the software suite and will be working with the community to enable its integration.

With the integration of Pentaho's reporting engine and the new OpenOffice.org Report Designer, developed by Sun, OpenOffice.org users will be able to create reports with content from the OpenOffice.org Base database as well as a wide range of proprietary and open source relational databases, OLAP and XML sources. For example, users will be able to generate customer invoices by creating a customer invoice template and then pulling customer names, addresses, and current due balances from an accounts receivable application or database. They can then produce the invoices as OpenOffice.org Writer documents.

"The new integrated reporting and database connectivity capabilities should be well-received by the millions of OpenOffice.org users around the world," said Michael Bemmer, director of Engineering for OpenOffice.org and StarOffice at Sun. "These additions by Pentaho, rooted in work with Sun to make OpenOffice a robust open source productivity suite, will offer another compelling reason for widespread adoption across an extended range of operating systems."

Pentaho Reporting was selected because of its superior architecture and functionality, and proven performance and scalability. Other factors included the strength of the Pentaho community and Pentaho's ability to provide an open source upgrade path for OpenOffice.org users who want to add analysis or dashboard capabilities, enterprise data integration, or a BI platform to provide workflow, scheduling, and security.

"The addition of Pentaho's reporting features to the OpenOffice.org suite is a big win for both the OpenOffice.org and Pentaho communities," said Thomas Morgner, chief architect for Reporting at Pentaho. "It integrates two best-of-breed applications that will help attract more users to both projects."

"This integration demonstrates how well open source products can work together," said Ocke Janssen, software engineer, OpenOffice.org Base at Sun. "Supporting the ISO-standard Open Document Format can ease integration with other systems while providing a durable standard for accessing data far into the future."

OpenOffice.org is one of the world's most widely used open source products with more than 80 million cumulative downloads. OpenOffice.org supports a wide range of platforms including Linux, Macintosh and Windows, and has won numerous "Reader's Choice" awards. Sun's StarOffice(TM) suite is based on OpenOffice.org and is included in the Solaris(TM) 10 Operating Systems (OS). OpenOffice.org is also included in popular Linux distributions from companies such as Red Hat, Novell and Canonical. Leading analyst firms have estimated OpenOffice.org's market share at 10 percent in the U.S. Market.

Originally known as JFreeReport, Pentaho's reporting project was first released in May 2002 and acquired by Pentaho in December of 2005. Since the acquisition, Pentaho has added a drag-and-drop report designer, MDX support, and integration with the Pentaho platform for report scheduling, security, and portal integration. Pentaho's recently announced standards-based metadata layer and AJAX-based ad hoc query tool will also support and extend Pentaho Reporting's capabilities. These enhancements demonstrate the power of the open source development model to accelerate technology innovation and functional upgrades.

"This agreement adds an important partner to our portfolio, raises the visibility of our open source reporting offering, and validates the strengths of Pentaho Reporting and the Pentaho Open BI Suite in general," said Richard Daley, CEO of Pentaho. "It also marks another important step in providing robust open source applications to the market."

About Pentaho

Pentaho provides a full spectrum of business intelligence (BI) capabilities including reporting, analysis, dashboards, data mining, data integration, and a BI platform that have made it the world's most popular open source BI suite. Formed by a highly experienced team of industry veterans, Pentaho's mission is to bring innovative, high quality technology and professional support to the BI market. Pentaho uses a revolutionary approach to development, distribution and support made possible by a professional open source business model. Pentaho is the primary sponsor and owner of popular open source projects including JFreeReport, Kettle, Mondrian, and Weka. Pentaho's technologies support a wide range of business initiatives from sales and profitability analysis, customer analysis, HR reporting, Financial reporting, KPI dashboards, Supply Chain analytics, and operational reporting. More information is available at www.pentaho.org .