i-Kno Knowledge Solutions has signed a strategic partner agreement with Pentaho, an open source software business intelligence (BI) vendor. The deal will allow i-Kno to provide BI solutions and services to the public and private sector.
According to Gerrit van Dyk, MD of i-Kno Knowledge Solutions, i-Kno is the only local partner for Pentaho. This will pave the way for greater market share in SA for both companies.
Van Dyk says: “We have been looking for a specialist open source BI vendor that would further enhance and grow our current open source portfolio with solutions such as Alfresco and Jaspersoft, because BI is a very large component of knowledge management.
“After a rigorous evaluation process of Pentaho's service offering, we were confident that we could provide a very strong solution to the local market, because the product covers the entire BI solution stack.”
Van Dyk says this partnership comes at a time where companies are feeling the pinch due to the economic downturn, and IT budgets are being squeezed from all sides. In turn, the proprietary BI software vendor market is going through significant consolidation, creating uncertainty in the market about future direction, product obsolescence and cohesive integration.
“Given the state of the entire IT industry and the economy as a whole, it's important for organisations to keep operational costs down while increasing performance and productivity. Pentaho's BI solution provides a perfect platform for that. Like us, Pentaho is a very passionate organisation, and I look forward to a long-standing profitable partnership with the company.”
The Pentaho BI suite provides a full spectrum of BI capabilities, including query and reporting, interactive analysis, dashboards and integration used by organisations including US Naval Air Systems Command, Lifetime Networks, Terra Industries, Sun Microsystems, and MySQL.
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