Open Source BI Pentaho-Openbravo Integration
A couple of days ago I wrote about my intentions to work on integrating Pentaho, an open source BI solution and Openbravo, one of the leading open source ERP products. Implementing a BI solution on top of your ERP system can provide a lot of added value for your ERP project.
After I wrote about my Pentaho-Openbravo integration plans,I got some positive feedback about the idea, as it seems a natural fit for existing Openbravo customers.
I also got an interesting comment from the Openbravo community director. I understand that Openbravo already got a request from some of its customers to add BI functionality to the Openbravo Suite, and are working on providing the integration themselves. From reading their functional specification document, it seems like they are still considering which open source BI to integrate with. I believe the decision will be to integrate Pentaho.
Obviously, this is great news. I have no plans of developing anything in parallel to Openbravo. I will try to get more details about the scope and timeline of the Openbravo-Pentaho connector. I am going to continue to work on my own connectivity,hoping I can contribute with my knowledge to Openbravo’s ‘official’ efforts, but my connector will not be released to the community as I thought I might do.
Commercial BI-ERP Connectivity Ownership
An interesting thing to note is that in commercial enterprise software, the BI vendor is always in charge of the connectivity to the ERP (or any other backend) system. The BI vendor writes an ETL connectors or adapters that can consume data from major ERP systems. No additional efforts are required on behalf of the ERP vendor. In our case, it seems like the ERP vendor (e.g. Openbravo) is going to be in charge of developing the integration-writing code, publishing documentation and supporting the solution. I think it must be a cooperation between the two project, and the ownership of the connector should be on the BI side (Pentaho). We’ll have to see how it goes.
Funny Pentaho Clip
Pentaho Installation
The next post will be an open source BI Pentaho installation walkthrough on an Ubunu 8.04 Linux Machine. Stay tuned.
