Pentaho has just landed a new round of funding. This is great news for anyone who is a proponent of open source, or really anyone looking to get greater insight into operations without paying an arm and a leg to SAS or Teradata, etc.

What did make me laugh, if you look at the link to the Venture Beat article, is the fact that it has “business intelligence” in quotes. It made me think - either these guys don’t understand the software space, or it seems like they are skeptical of Pentaho’s ability to provide business insight.

I am sure it is the former, but it does bring up an interesting point in terms of the mainstream acceptance of open source software. For the most part, the “mainstream” at large doesn’t know much about business software in general. This is a pro and a con. I still think buyers simply want a solution that works - and lower cost is an added benefit. But old school closed source vendors will play the FUD card as long as they can.

But even as a CRM provider, I am surprised at how many businesses are unaware of the term, and the fact that there are so many providers of different types. The opportunities still abound, really…

One artists depiction of an IT buyer following a SAS deployment..