Yeah, yeah I did it again. If you are reading this, I roped you in with one of my wacky eye catching titles.Today Pentaho announced its On-Demand BI Subscription. - Press Release - On-Demand BI Subscription, you say? What exactly does that mean? Simply stated, choices. Choices for those who want to "implement" or even "evaluate" a Pentaho BI solution easily.
In addition to the traditional means of an "on premise" or "in the cloud" installation approach, prospects and customers now have the option to choose dedicated hardware and software resources. This enables them to "choose" and combine the infrastructure management and professional services they need while maintaining the option to expand or contract services as business needs change. This not only makes Pentaho BI Solutions available to those with limited budgets, but also allows those with non-existent or poorly skilled IT resources to play in the BI space as well. Believe me, in my career I have seen many evaluations go south simply because the individuals involved couldn't even spell BI let alone evaluate it. See prior article here.
Let's face it. When it comes to evaluating BI Solutions, it can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. There are needs and wants and hopefully a scope surrounding those objectives you want to prove. If you have the resources, time, money and are a control freak then maybe Pentaho On-demand is not for you at first. No big deal. You can use the Pentaho software in the traditional approach, work with our evaluation support team and evaluate in the comfort of your own infrastrcuture. However if you are resource constrained (who isn't these days), lack the time to focus specifically on just evaluating BI and possibly don't have the proper data structures in place to support BI (you know who you are - OLTP or Pseudo DW guys) perhaps the 72 Hour Challenge is the way to go. - 72 Hour Challenge details - Business champions can get rapid reusable results without IT involvement and even showcase the results internally to achieve further buy-in. This gives others in the organization the opportunity to preview a preliminary Pentaho solution while reducing the risk of wasting additional resources from the vendor and the prospect.
For additional details on this topic, please follow the links embedded in this blog. As you can see, prospects and customers are truly getting the best of both worlds,...hmmm kind of like Hanna Montana (yes, my kids watch the Disney channel, so shut up :-) ).
