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Pentaho Acquired Data Mining

Sep 30, 2006 BI News

Pentaho announced the latest in a string of open-source project buys, with the acquisition of the Weka data mining and predictive analytics project developed by the University of Waikato in New Zealand.

The move follows the startup’s previous purchases of the Mondrian OLAP engine, the JFreeReport Java reporting library, and the Kettle ETL project.

So far, the start-up doesn’t provide customer numbers for its commercial software, but on the open-source side, Pentaho saw 85,000 downloads of its offerings in August.

According to the company, making money is not a priority. The CEO was quoted as saying, “Monetization is about fourth or fifth down the list in terms of our priorities.”

Pentaho plans to compete against Cognos and Business Objects and other open-source BI players like JasperSoft, in addition to SPSS and SAS.

Comments:

* While the company is filling out its BI stack, there are no identifiable customers for the commercial version of its software. It is clear that enterprise customers are still leary of betting the farm on an unproven product, not matter how low the cost. Downloads are not an accurate measure of customers, as they include multiple downloads, evaluations, etc. No matter how much the company claims that money is not important, their $6MM in venture funding will only go so far. Eventually, paying customers will have to fund ongoing investments in development/acquisitions and sales.