Delta Dental Signs Up For Open Source Business Intelligence SoftwareDelta Dental Signs Up For Open Source Business Intelligence Software

Pentaho, a startup that develops open source business intelligence software, said Thursday it had signed up Delta Dental of Virginia as a customer, winning the business from SAP's Business Objects. It's the latest add to a growing list of midsize to large businesses trying out Pentaho's open source BI product.

Delta Dental of Virginia, a provider of employee dental benefits programs with $320 million in annual revenue, says it's using Pentaho's extract, transform, and load, or ETL, and reporting tools. The software provides its clients with historical reports to facilitate their access to such things as claims information and enrollment data. Systems used for the effort include an Oracle Linux server, a JBoss Application Server, and an Oracle 10g database.

The benefits provider had been using SAP Business Objects, but went with Pentaho after a comparison. Delta Dental found it could "achieve their business goals more quickly while reducing their costs" by using Pentaho, according to the companies.

Open source BI is a relatively new concept, but Pentaho has good momentum with midsize to large companies. Those using its products include Lifetime Networks, Orbitz, Sun Microsystems, Mosanto, Wachovia, and Terra Industries.

Pentaho "leads and sponsors" the open source projects that are core to its suite, giving it direct influence over software development. The developer community involved in those projects is around 8,000 members. Pentaho generates revenue via technical support and management services for enterprise customers.

Pentaho also announced Thursday that it's releasing its BI Platform, the infrastructure for integrating its BI tools, under GPLv2, a version of the GNU General Public License published by the Free Software Foundation. The popular open source license is intended to ensure that software remains open and that investments in it are protected against commercialization by other parties.