Greenplum’s Bizgres-based data warehousing platform is built on a massively parallel implementation of the PostgreSQL open source database. Orlando, Florida-based Pentaho, meanwhile, has assembled a broad BI platform consisting of query and reporting, OLAP analysis, data integration and data mining tools.
The certification of interoperability aims to create a LAMP-like stack of open source components that interoperate for enterprise BI requirements.
The collaboration with Pentaho continues a pattern of partnerships that San Mateo, California-based Greenplum has struck up this year with companies like Unica, Kinetic Networks and Sun Microsystems.
Greenplum is already part of a BI architecture stack that comprises Kinetic’s open source ETL: software and JasperSoft’s reporting tools. The trio have already developed a proof of concept application for web-based clickstream analysis.
The new Greenplum certification will also allow Pentaho’s BI platform to integrate with Sun’s Data Warehouse Appliance which is built on Greenplum’s MPP database and Sun’s x4500 servers.
Our View
With more companies looking closely at integrated BI suites the challenge for open source BI vendors is to work more tighter as a community across different technology domains. Interoperability standards and partnerships between open source BI components is therefore key to pushing open source BI into mainstream corporate computing environments.
Open source BI vendors now seem to be cottoning on and some are now pushing in this direction by pulling together integrated LAMP stacks of software for building and running BI applications. LAMP refers to an integrated framework of open source software components (Linux, Apache Web server, MySQL and PHP, Perl or Python scripting languages) that have been certified (i.e. tested) to work together. The efforts of companies such as these to make LAMP more industrial strength and push it into mainstream corporate computing environments is making LAMP a more cohesive and competitive offering to Microsoft’s .NET and Java products.
However certifications between different collections of open source BI software is not guarantee of success. Many open source BI vendors are looking to sites like SpikeSource.com to offer testing and certification services for their open source products. But it does help getting the technology more easily into corporate IT shops. Partnering with established open source vendors like JBoss and MySQL will certainly help open source BI tools gain credibility in the mainstream IT.
