Pentaho Announces Pentaho Spreadsheet Services; Pentaho and Simba Technologies Partner to Bring World's Most Popular Open Source OLAP Project to Microsoft Excel Users.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Pentaho Corp., the world's leading provider of Open Source Business Intelligence (BI) software, announced Pentaho Spreadsheet Services, a joint project with Simba Technologies Inc. that will bring the benefits of Pentaho's open source OLAP capabilities to Microsoft Office users around the world.

A Pervasive Business User Application

With hundreds of millions of active users, Microsoft Excel has established itself as one of the favorite applications of business users. People have taken advantage of Excel for years for its easy ability to create basic reports and analytical views of information. Excel has also added features like Excel PivotTables that make it the interactive, analytical tool of choice for many business users.

The World's Most Popular Open Source OLAP Offering

Over the last few years, Pentaho's Mondrian OLAP project has become the most popular and well-known open source OLAP offering, consistently in the 99th percentile for activity on www.sourceforge.net. Under the terms of this agreement, Pentaho becomes the exclusive distributor of Simba's Microsoft Excel connectivity technology for use with Mondrian, which will be delivered and branded as Pentaho Spreadsheet Services. Through this partnership, Pentaho brings the high-value, robust open source OLAP capabilities of Mondrian to business users working in Microsoft Office. Pentaho continues to set the standard in ease-of-use for open source BI, and this new offering represents a significant step forward in bringing the benefits of open source to a wider and wider audience.

Simba, using its technologies and applying its expertise, has worked very closely with many leading companies, such as Microsoft, MIS and SAP, to enable standards-based data connectivity between the most popular, multi-vendor BI products available today. Simba's Microsoft Excel connectivity technology provides the necessary open interfaces to connect Pentaho Spreadsheet Services to Microsoft Excel.

Specifically, Pentaho Spreadsheet Services allows business users to access OLAP data in Mondrian using Microsoft Excel's PivotTable capabilities. PivotTables provide an easy, interactive way for business users to analyze critical business information, by exploring the data to quickly uncover trends or anomalies. For example, a user looking at sales information for last year could easily "drill down" from the yearly summary to break out sales by quarter, compare sales across product lines, or analyze specific sales performance in different geographic regions.

"The OLAP Surveys have shown that Excel is consistently the most popular front-end for most major OLAP servers," said Nigel Pendse, primary author of The OLAP Report, www.olapreport.com and The OLAP Survey, www.survey.com/olap. "Pentaho Spreadsheet Services will make it much easier for the many organizations which rely on Excel to take advantage of Mondrian's capabilities. This is a sensible, pragmatic link between popular open source and proprietary software."

A Partnership of Leaders

Simba Technologies Inc. (http://www.simba.com) is the recognized world leader in standards-based data access products, solutions and services. Pentaho is the world's fastest-growing open source BI project, providing the broadest set of modular open source BI capabilities including reporting, analysis, dashboards, data integration, and a BI platform, all available via open source licensing. Together, the companies have combined Simba's expertise in ODBO, XMLA, and MDX with Pentaho's expertise in open source technology and OLAP. The product is expected to be available in June 2006.

"Simba has built our expertise around MDX since 1997, and we are very excited to share our MDX knowledge and interconnectivity expertise with Pentaho," said Amyn Rajan, President and CEO of Simba Technologies. "The BI space is changing rapidly, and Simba sees this as an excellent opportunity to work together to ensure interoperability between Microsoft's applications and Pentaho's open source OLAP engine."

"This is a major advancement for open source business intelligence, and Pentaho is leading the way," said Richard Daley, CEO of Pentaho Corp. "Making the world's most popular open source OLAP engine accessible from Microsoft Excel will bring the benefits of open source BI to more and more business users, and set a new standard for ease of use and accessibility in open source BI."

About Pentaho

Pentaho provides a full spectrum of open source Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities including reporting, analysis, dashboards, data mining, data integration, and a BI platform. Formed by a highly experienced team of industry veterans, Pentaho's mission is to bring innovative, high quality technology and professional support to the BI market. Pentaho uses a revolutionary approach to development, distribution and support made possible by an open source business model. Pentaho's technologies support a wide range of business initiatives from sales and profitability analysis, customer analysis, HR reporting, Financial reporting, KPI dashboards, Supply Chain analytics, and operational reporting.

For more information: Pentaho's web site is located at www.pentaho.org.

For information on Pentaho Spreadsheet Services, please see www.pentaho.com.

About Simba Technologies

Simba Technologies Inc. (http://www.simba.com) is the recognized world leader in standards-based data access products, solutions and services. Simba delivers data connectivity and interoperability solutions to many of the world's leading companies on various platforms, including Windows, Solaris and Linux. Simba's best-in-class products support multiple interfaces, including ODBC, JDBC, OLE DB, OLE DB for OLAP (ODBO), XML for Analysis (XMLA), ADO, ADO.NET, ADOMD, ADOMD.NET and OLAP BAPI.

Simba's software is used worldwide. Its customers include leading independent software vendors and global enterprises, such as ALG Software, Descisys, Microsoft, MIS AG and SAP AG.