Joining the Pentaho Board

I have officially joined the Board of Directors at Pentaho.  See the announcement here.

Pentaho is a company that I'm obviously very excited about.  It fits the thesis for Open Source business models in the current economic environment that I've been developing:

1. A well-known application that is traditionally big and expensive.  This gives Pentaho a lot of aircover in setting pricing.
2. A large, neglected SMB market opportunity.  BI couple be useful to many SMB businesses out there, but they can't afford the current solutions.  This gives Pentaho a way to enter the market below the entrenched big boys.
3. A large enterprise market.  Even though there's a broad SMB market, the Pentaho platform can scale up into the enterprise market, further increasing the market opportunity and putting continued pressuer on the incumbents.
4. Incumbents can't move down market.  Companies like Business Objects, Hyperion, and Cognos can't offer entry level solutions to compete with Pentaho Open Source without breaking their business model.

The Pentaho team also gets Open Source and truely wants to build a viable Open Source community.  I think this company will do great things.