Pentaho Adds More BI Appeal via Acquisition

For a lot of business users, the beauty of any application is only skin deep. If a business intelligence application doesn’t provide them with an appealing experience, they aren’t going to embrace it or give up their dependency on spreadsheet applications.

To help make the Pentaho business intelligence application environment more attractive to end users, Pentaho announced today that it is acquiring Webdetails, a long-time consulting partner for Pentaho that specializes in creating user interfaces and dashboards for applications based on Pentaho BI software.

According to Pedro Alves, senior vice president of community for Pentaho, the addition of Webdetails to the Pentaho portfolio will make it easier for the company to expose the power of the company’s open source BI software to a much larger number of end users.

As an open source application, Pentaho benefits from being able to distribute a version of its software that organizations can experiment with before formally committing to adopt it. But turning the power of Pentaho BI software into an application that is easily accessible to the average end user requires a fair amount of additional work and expertise.

By acquiring Webdetails, Pentaho is moving to close a gap that has made a lot of commercial BI applications appear more appealing to end users, which, when it comes to BI software, still exert a fair amount of control over not only what BI software is acquired, but, more importantly, what is actually used.