source : http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/080923/0436799.html
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Breadboard BI Assists YachtWorld.com & Boats.com to Unleash the Power of Their Data

Breadboard BI, a leading business intelligence (BI) software and professional services company, today announced that YachtWorld.com & Boats.com of Seattle have deployed an innovative market intelligence solution name BoatsReports. The actionable information in BoatsReports offers internal analysts and external partners previously unavailable insights into their data.


Together, YachtWorld.com and Boats.com are the single most powerful and effective global marketing solution for the boating industry. With over 140,000 new and used boat listings worldwide offered by over 4,000 brokers, dealers and builders in 115 countries, they are visited by over 4 million boating consumers every month who click through over 95 million page views.

Like many companies, YachtWorld.com & Boats.com were collecting large quantities of data from their diverse operational systems -- millions of daily page views from each of their popular web sites, as well as significant volumes of sales lead emails and toll free calls to their affiliated brokers, dealers, and builders. Understanding the potential value of this data, a project was planned to affordably build an innovative market intelligence product.

Since its release, BoatsReports has transformed oceans of disparate data into actionable information -- providing previously unavailable insights to users. Specific examples include the ability for boat manufacturers to accurately monitor their sales leads and the sales leads of their participating dealers by model and location; know which boat models are generating the most interest with the buying public in different countries; and understand how their boat models measure up against the competition within each market segment.

The new BoatsReports solution was built on a 100% open source stack -- from the Linux operating system on the servers, to the database, to the data integration and presentation layers. This stack required zero upfront investment in commercial license fees (usually running well into USD six figures), making it easier to receive internal project approval.

"In order to provide maximum value to our client, we considered a variety of proprietary business intelligence tools and database systems," said Chris Lavigne, Partner at Breadboard BI. "We built BoatsReports on a 100% open source stack because the tools met all the technical requirements of our client, and they were extremely cost-effective."

A more detailed case study is available at http://www.breadboardbi.com/white_papers/case_study_boats.pdf.

About Breadboard BI

Breadboard BI provides business intelligence (BI) and general software application development consulting. They also offer a suite of customizable BI modules that span the customer, finance, supply chain, and workforce functional areas. Visit www.breadboardbi.com to learn more, and to interact with a live demonstration server. Headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, Breadboard BI has partnerships with companies in the Americas, Australia, and Europe.

About YachtWorld.com & Boats.com

YachtWorld.com is the premier online sales channel for yacht brokers around the world; Boats.com provides marketing and Web services to new boat dealers and builders, and offers a "For Sale By Owner" classified service. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, YachtWorld.com and Boats.com have European headquarters in the United Kingdom, with sales offices in Germany, Italy and Russia, and sales representation in Dubai, Australia and China. Both companies are business units of Dominion Enterprises, based in Norfolk, Va.

http://blog.devdonkey.org/?p=12

Data integration in business environments can be a painful task. I mean REAL painful. The volume of data is huge, it does not cross-validate, it is dispersed in many heterogeneous formats, yadi yada. You know the song. Some day, I stumbled on Pentaho Data Integration (PDI).This was a real breakthrough.

First thing first, it’s not subject to “vendor lock-in”. It can read most data formats out there and can write it back to pretty much anything. This is a huge plus because gives it the ability to be used by a plenitude of user types and environments. Being written in Java also gives it an edge as an enterprise tool, for it is platform agnostic.

But the real advantages are not those trivial specifications. My love for PDI has much deeper roots. Simply put : it’s powerful. Creating an integration process is a trivial matter. Drag and drop. Link. Execute. Those three simple steps will cover most of your business needs. Really, I mean it. Never again will I write a snippet of code to read a CSV file and write it’s content in a database. Mark my words; NEVER! This is a waste of time and a developer who lives with his times should know that.

What about the real juicy stuff ?

As you suspected, there is much more to PDI than meets the eye. It can be clustered, it can use a database based repository for all processes, there are automatic documentation generation tools and is supported by a huge community. Many tutorials exist to address most business needs and challenges. It’s well made, very stable and easily expandable with plugins for power users.

I strongly recommend to give it a try. The next version should be released soon and it will include many great new features. I met Matt Casters last June and had the chance to see for myself all the new functionalities that will make it to the next release. We’re talking about visual performance bottleneck exploration and some more neat stuff you won’t find anywhere else.

Cheers, and have a good time integrating !!

Tags: bi, business intelligence, kettle, matt casters, PDI, pentaho, pentaho data integration

By Sean Michael Kerner on June 5, 2008 2:36 PM

The move away from Mozilla open source licenses continues today with open source Business Intelligence (BI) vendor Pentaho moving to the GPL. It's a sign of the times that professional open source vendors are embracing the GPL and leaving behind licenses that don't demand reciprocity.

Pentaho had been available under an MPL (Mozilla Public License) and as of the upcoming release they'll be on the GPL --- but get this - they're moving to GPLv2 and not GPLv3. According to a FAQ on the transition:
GPLv2 is more compatible with more of our partners' licenses and community open source distributions than GPLv3 is today.. Pentaho could move the platform components mentioned above to GPLv3 at a later date, based on partner and community feedback.
In their FAQ, Pentaho notes the reason for the move is due to the widespread adoption and understanding of the GPL. Frankly I think that reason is a little lame - considering that the GPL was widely adopted and understood when Pentaho adopted the MPL in the first place.

Pentaho also cites, what I think is the 'real' driver:
Because the GPL is what's known as a "reciprocal license" it ensures that the software is open and remains open.
With an MPL license a developer could take the code, make modification and not contribute those changes back to the community. With the GPL that's not possible. If you modify GPL code you must contribute those changes back. Reciprocity protects users and it protects the vendor as well ensuring that the code remains free.

The other driver IMHO could well be to help itself against the 'other' open source BI player - namely JasperSoft. The JasperSoft Community Edition is already licensed under the GPL.

Pentaho is the latest in a string of vendors that have moved from MPL (or MPL plus attribution) to the GPL in recent years. In February of 2007, Alfresco moved to the GPL, SugarCRM also moved to GPL in 2007 (though they chose GPLv3).

I successfully added the iPhone extension to my Pentaho platform today and I was more then impressed with the ease with which we can enable the whole platform to work seamlessly on those nifty little phones.

Oh yeah, I bought an iPhone too…

I’m slowly discovering the fun of having a cellular phone in my pocket. This is something that I never experienced before; never had a cell phone. I have to say that I’m glad it’s a good phone, and sexy too.

The bottom line is : get one.

For those interested, here’s the wiki page that says it all. Thanks to Will Gorman, senior developer at Pentaho, who put this all up.