The open source OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite is about to get an
injection of business intelligence thanks to a cooperative effort between
Sun Microsystems and open source BI vendor Pentaho.
The Pentaho reporting engine is set to be included with the upcoming OOo 2.3
release and will provide users with easy access to advanced business-intelligence reporting capabilities. With the BI integration, OOo — and Sun’s
StarOffice on which OOo is based — may well become an even more attractive
option to business users, as it ratchets up the competition against
Microsoft Office.
“The new reporting solution will make OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, Sun’s
professional distribution of OpenOffice.org, even more attractive to
professional users and thus help to grow the market share for both
products,” Erwin Tenhumberg, community development and marketing manager
of the open source group at Sun Microsystems, told internetnews.com.
“This will increase the demand for Sun’s OpenOffice.org and StarOffice
support and services offerings, as well as for related
technologies like thin-client technologies (Sun Ray) and alternatives to
Microsoft Exchange (i.e. the Sun Java System Communication Suite).”
What the new integration will do is allow a business user to basically
create an OpenOffice Writer (word processing) document that embeds
reporting/database content into a document.
Pentaho spokesperson Lance Walter explained that if, for example, someone
wanted to create customer invoices that pulled data out of a database, they
would use the reporting capabilities and would ultimately end up with
customer invoices produced as OpenOffice Writer documents.
For Pentaho, the integration with OOo also represents an opportunity to help
grow their business, too.
“It’s really a seeding opportunity, similar to how Crystal Reports was
always bundled with Visual Basic/Visual Studio,” Walter said. “If people
want to take what they’re doing in OpenOffice with desktop reporting, and
move up to server-based reporting, or add analysis, ETL, dashboards, or
other capabilities, they can take advantage of the whole Pentaho suite, for
which we offer professional support via a subscription.”
Pentaho competes in the open source BI space with JasperSoft, among others. A JasperSoft
spokesperson told internetnews.com that the company has no official
comment at this time about the Pentaho/OOo deal.
According to Sun’s Tenhumberg, the deal with Pentaho came about because
OpenOffice.org and StarOffice users asked for better reporting capabilities
for the database component. Tenhumberg noted that Pentaho offered the right
feature set, open source background, commitment and people to work with.
There may be future collaboration between Sun and Pentaho for OOo in the
future, though no one is promising anything yet.
“Currently we’re focusing on the reporting solution,” Tenhumberg said. “We
will think about other opportunities once the work on the reporting solution
has been completed.”
