• Ab Initio sells high-end data integration software.
• Ab Initio commonly costs $1/2 million or so.
• Ab Initio’s core claims include:
  • “It just works”
  • Ab Initio has great performance, even on big tasks.
  • Unlike many competitors, Ab Initio has an integrated product line written from scratch. (Hence the “Ab Initio” name.)
• Like most data integration software – Talend is an exception – Ab Initio includes an execution engine.
• Everybody agrees that Ab Initio’s software has great performance, although Talend claims to come close and Expressor claims to be faster yet. But rivals assert that besides having high license fees, Ab Initio’s software is also very consumptive of hardware resources. Certainly I’d suggest checking that aspect carefully if you ever get into an Ab Initio POC.  Perhaps that’s what Ab Initio means by saying its software uses any and all hardware resources. )
• Price isn’t the only regard in which Ab Initio is hard to do business with. Another is secretive business practices. For example, Ab Initio – confident in the quality of its software – pushes prospects toward POCs (Proofs-Of-Concept). But it wraps so many NDA requirements around these that some prospects walk away.
• Not surprisingly, Ab Initio has added lots of features over the years, especially in response to prospect or customer requests. Examples I was given include:
  • IBM OS/390 support (including COBOL copybooks, etc.)
  • SOAP/XML support. Associated with that is a story that boils down to “With great encapsulation, one can change a complex system of data integration processes incrementally without going crazy.”
  • A compressed file system that can directly store 100s of TBs of user data, with very fast query performance. Apparently, this is not at the extremes of inflexibility, as it is realistic to have up to 5-6 keys on a table (at least). Associated with that is a story that boils down to “Hey, if you’re only getting at something via web services, you’re limited in how you can query it anyway. Worst case – your needs expand and you decide to put the data back in a true DBMS after all.”
  • Similarly, Ab Initio claims that its software is easier to use than rival, cobbled-together products. While Ab Initio may not dispute the existence of products that can get data integration tasks done more simply, it argues that these products do a lot less than Ab Initio does.

• Much like Jaspersoft, Pentaho’s initial focus was mainly on embedded, operational BI.
• However, Pentaho now feels it has a decent end-user GUI as well, and traditional-BI is a bigger part of sales.
• Also, some sales are focused on data integration, perhaps in support of more traditional BI products. Pentaho has even had an Ab Initio replacement in data integration. (Can there be any change more extreme than going from Ab Initio to open source?)
• As an example of technical breadth, Pentaho says that its Mondrian OLAP engine is used by Jaspersoft.
• Pentaho has Excel output, but not in the form of live formulas.
• Pentaho does XQuery.
• Industries with more Pentaho adoption than average include:
  • Financial services (traditionally open-source-friendly, according to Pentaho)
  • Government (ditto)
  • Web 2.0 (obviously ditto)
  • Travel/transportation (cash-strapped)
• Frontier Airlines is a Pentaho/Greenplum customer.
• TradeDoubler is a Pentaho/InfoBright customer. (Pentaho thinks that TradeDoubler reloads its warehouse every day, which if true frankly casts some doubt on InfoBright’s architecture.)
• Data mining is something of a Pentaho sideline. There’s some university in New Zealand that built data mining capabilities in Pentaho, and some data mining research is done in that. Separately, Pentaho has been integrated with R.
• Community contributions are concentrated in the areas you’d expect — features some user or system integrator needs for a specific project, connectors, bug reports, and the like.

The briefing included one of the better slide decks I’ve seen in a while, which Pentaho gave me permission to share (in somewhat abbreviated form) here. In particular, Pentaho provided customer examples illustrating most of the use cases cited above.

Pentaho facts and figures include:

• Pentaho was founded in 2004. The first dozen or so reference customers were acquired in 2007. Before that usage of the product was mainly downloads of a free version.
• Actually, Pentaho’s free usage is more focused on embedded libraries, while paid usage is more skewed to traditional BI.
• Pentaho’s average selling price is $24-25K for first year revenue, which is extremely close to Jaspersoft’s figure.
• There are 100,000+ downloads per month, but Pentaho cautions that’s a very misleading figure. Some users download over 100 different pieces of the product, including for example all the national language support and all the different platform-specific support pieces.
• Pentaho doesn’t offer much in the way of more realistic metric of company size or success.
• Europe provides 35-40% of Pentaho revenue.
• Pentaho has at least one Asia/Pacific reference.
• 50% or so of Pentaho customers are on MySQL. Oracle and Postgres are in a rough tie for #2. That appears to be PostgreSQL rather than EnterpriseDB’s Postgres Plus.

Probably, these are just failings or limitations of the product. Wilder speculation includes intellectual property violations and the like, but in most cases the reason that people don’t want to be evaluated is simply that they think an evaluation would wind up including negative aspects.

Or maybe it’s ownership and funding. When a company doesn’t even reveal management’s names, you know they’re taking secrecy to extremes. Again, I refer to the example of Thunderstone, an outfit that once had very good search technology and an impressive customer base, but now barely shows up in the market’s awareness.

Is Ab Initio all flash — and Flash — and no substance? Do they rely on selling to a few enterprises they can bamboozle, free from interference by prying analysts? Obviously, I don’t know for sure, but that’s how my guesses are leaning right now.