Open-source business intelligence (BI) software vendor Pentaho is hoping a new tie-up unveiled today with the OpenOffice.org community and Sun Microsystems will bring its BI offerings to the attention of many more new users.
OpenOffice.org (see our OpenOffice review here) is an open-source suite of desktop applications positioned as a rival to Microsoft’s Office suite. It has its origins in the StarOffice suite acquired by Sun in 1999, with the vendor founding the OpenOffice.org project in 2000. Sun is the primary contributor of code to the OpenOffice.org project.
OpenOffice.org estimates it has more than 40 million users around the world. The open-source desktop suite is included in several of the leading Linux distributions including Red Hat’s eponymous offering, Novell’s Suse Linux and Canonical’s Ubuntu.
Overall, the open-source community needs to start working more in solution-centric mode to compare better against Microsoft, Oracle, SAP stacks. More needs to be done and Sun should do more if they expect to gain more adoption in large to medium-size business.