Pentaho, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), has announced the availability of a new Pentaho iPhone (News - Alert) application, saying that it provides native iPhone web navigation of Pentaho BI content.

 

The integration was developed using the iUI project, currently hosted on Google (News - Alert) Code. According to company officials, the new iPhone BI extension from Pentaho offers an intuitive way for business users to access and navigate business intelligence information.

 

“The demand to provide BI where business users operate has changed significantly as mobile devices like Apple (News - Alert) iPhone have simplified business computing dramatically,” said Mark Smith, CEO & executive vice president of research at Ventana Research.

 

He also said that unlike many BI providers who are not supporting the Apple iPhone today, Pentaho is making it “easy to access business intelligence and support organizations of any size.”

 

Pentaho’s iPhone application enables iPhone users to navigate through interactive reports and dashboards, as well as to integrate BI functionality with other iPhone features like voice-calling, e-mail, and text messaging.

 

In addition, Pentaho has delivered the new iPhone capabilities in an open source model.

 

Company officials pointed out that the BI extension for iPhone is the newest enhancement to Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.7, which delivered earlier this year.

 

Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.7 allows users to create and share reports, as well as report design enhancements that deliver designer productivity features.

 

“We've delivered another 'first' in BI with Pentaho's BI extension for iPhone,” said Richard Daley, CEO at Pentaho Corporation. “Getting the most out of our commercial open source model means continuously delivering compelling new capabilities on open source, and we look forward to continued innovations in partnership with our global community.”

 

In 2006, the company first delivered an interactive, Web 2.0-based BI user interface, officials said that this new capability builds on Pentaho's web-enabled architecture and also uses Web 2.0 technologies to create an interactive experience for BI consumers on the iPhone.