Pentaho BI Professional Edition Platform to be priced at $3,000 per CPU, plus an additional annual support fee of $1,000. Founded by BI veterans from IBM, Cognos, and Hyperion, Pentaho executives are claiming that the Professional edition is as good as -- if not better -- than current packaged applications from the BI market leaders. "We don't want to be judged as an open source company but as a BI application provider," said lance Walter, vice president of marketing at Pentaho.

Part of that claim rests on the fact that typical BI tools integrate at the data level and at the user interface level as a frame in the application or the portal, according to Walter. But Pentaho has a workflow engine in its platform that understands the BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) standard. "We can now integrate at the process level, so whatever business rules are controlling the rest of the process can control Pentaho and add the BI value into those business processes with far less effort than traditional approaches," said Walter. Despite the BPEL capability, Josh Greenbaum, principal analyst with Enterprise Applications Consulting, was not impressed.

The open source software model will continue its assault on traditional applications deployed by the enterprise.

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Prashanth Rai