As The VAR Guy has reported, SugarCRM veteran Lars Nordwall is now senior VP of business development at Pentaho -- an open source business intelligence software company. Nordwall's focus area includes building Pentaho's channel partner program.

The VAR Guy

December 8, 2008

3 Min Read
Pentaho Channel Chief Lars Nordwall Talks Open Source Business Intelligence

Pentaho Open Source Business IntelligenceAs The VAR Guy has reported, SugarCRM veteran Lars Nordwall is now senior VP of business development at Pentaho — an open source business intelligence software company. Nordwall’s focus area includes building Pentaho’s channel partner program. The VAR Guy traded email with Nordwall to learn why he leaped to Pentaho. Here are Nordwall’s thoughts on the open source BI and the IT channel.

Nordwall’s perspective on the Business Intelligence market:

“As you may know, I have a deep Business Intelligence background (was head of the global BI practice at Cambridge Technology Partners for many years) and I believe that the BI market has an enormous growth potential. The demand for BI is growing very rapidly and our competition face enormous challenges (proprietary, old technology, inflexible pricing, high cost structure, Business Objects / Cognos / Hyperion / Brio are all acquired, etc.).”

Nordwall’s thoughts on the role channel partners will play in Pentaho‘s strategy:

“I expect the Channel to play a very important role for any commercial open source company going forward with the pressure to keep cost of sale at a minimum and with expectations to expand globally. In my book, VAR’s around the world will become very strategic partners to the commercial open source market over the next 3-4 years.”

Bingo. Re-read that last paragraph. Nordwall is absolutely on the mark. The open source industry is converging with the IT channel. Solutions providers can either climb on the bandwagon or get trampled amid the software market disruption.

Pentaho understands that. But The VAR Guy has to concede: Pentaho isn’t the only open source BI game in town. The folks at JasperSoft have been reaching out to our resident blogger lately. Seems like they’re preparing some news of their own. Stay tuned.

Now, back to the interview at hand. Nordwall on Pentaho’s business position:

“Pentaho offers a very solid solution offering, the founders have built two successful companies in the past, and the entire executive team is very experienced. I have known [Pentaho CEO] Richard [Daley] for the past ten years and I highly respect his leadership style. My experience, skill set, and passion were all well aligned with Pentaho’s vision, growth plan, and execution strategy, so the decision was easy. I had a fantastic run at Sugar with an opportunity to build a global sales organization with tremendous growth quarter over quarter as you know. Sugar was a small unknown start-up when I joined and matured into the market leading commercial open source CRM provider with thousands of customers around the world when I left.”

The VAR Guy will be writing a great deal more about Pentaho and the emerging open source IT channel. Stay tuned for the Open Source 50, which will highlight the key open source software companies building channel partner programs.

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