There are plenty of offerings out there. Most notably MicroStrategies, Oracle, SAP, and more. Of course most of the ones I just listed are simply not cost feasible for a small company to explore. To pay to play, it’s easy to lay out over $100K just to get something basic. Of course my budget was much much smaller than that so my boss pointed me towards an open source project called Pentaho and I have been steeped in it for the past month.

The documentation for Pentaho is pretty comprehensive if you are educated in the technologies involved. But for me, I had to get familiar with quite a few things before getting to do something useful.

Over the next few weeks, I will post up progress and some small tutorials to help someone new get started with the world of Pentaho.