Pentaho fires back across SAS' bows over "limited" open source appeal

Accuses SAS CEO of "denying a market reality"

Vinay Joosery, Pentaho's VP EMEA

Open source business intelligence player Pentaho has hit back at the criticism of open source BI by the CEO of SAS Institute, Dr Jim Goodnight.

In our story yesterday Goodnight said of the open source business intelligence competition: "We haven't noticed that a lot. Most of our companies need industrial strength software that has been tested, put through every possible scenario or failure to make sure everything works correctly. That's what you're getting from software companies like us - they're well tested and it scales to very, very large amounts of data."

But Pentaho's Vinay Joosery, EMEA VP, accused the co-founder and CEO of SAS - the largest privately held software firm in the world - of, "Denying a market reality."

"BI customers are not in denial about the sheer practical benefits of open source," said Joosery. "Because the software gets exposed to large communities it matures faster and is tested outside of the labs, in the real world, every day."

"We have clients who build their entire business on Pentaho software and so realise that the best software does not need to cost millions," Joosery added. "After all, the majority of the questions people have on their data are $1,000 questions, not million dollar questions. The move to Agile BI is afoot, and as the amount of data which is analyzed rises exponentially and the cost per query drops, vendors who cannot move with the times will be out-evolved."

"Denying a market reality doesn't help your business in the long term," Joosery said.

• Share:
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•