Pentaho - creator of the world's most popular open source business intelligence (BI) suite, today announced that it has acquired the Weka open source data mining project developed by the University of Waikato in New Zealand. Weka's advanced analytics equip users with the tools to identify complex patterns, associations and correlations that are critical to evaluating business performance and supporting strategic planning initiatives, particularly in consumer-driven industries such as retail, financial services, communications and consumer packaged goods.

The Pentaho and Weka teams will soon announce a road map covering their plans for enhancements including extension of Weka's analytic techniques to additional vertical industries, and integration of Weka with Pentaho's platform, data integration, and information delivery capabilities.

"Through the acquisition of the Weka project, Pentaho continues to show that there is no capability or application in the business intelligence market that can't or won't be addressed by the open source community," said Andre Boisvert, Chairman and co-founder of Pentaho.

As with its other open-source project buys, Pentaho is looking to make sure the technologies can "be used by the average human," Daley said, by adding wizards on top of their extensible markup language (XML) interfaces. The vendor is looking to work with partners to expand the Weka technology for use in specific industries including retail, finance and pharmaceuticals, he added.

Pentaho has sizeable ambitions, looking to be "the dominant open-source BI player," according to Daley. So far, the start-up doesn't provide customer numbers for its commercial software, but on the open-source side, Pentaho saw 85,000 downloads of its offerings in August.

Source: 1, 2

Prashanth Rai