Almost one year onIt's been one year since
Webdetails joined Pentaho. For me it seems much less than that! (even though if you ask the people that have to put up with me, I'm sure they'll say it feels like decades :p )
Throughout this time, we've been (re)defining a strategy for the Community - Yes, I actually have to do more work other than flying out to different countries in the world to have beers with interesting people. And it's a great sign to see that there's much more events than the ones I can attend.
![]() |
PCM13 group photo |
Pentaho Community StrategyThe goalsSince the beginning, I have pretty much identified the goals for our community strategy. We want the community to be:
A place for developersWhile our Enterprise offering is positioned as a production ready, enterprise scale solution, our open edition is aimed to gain the affection of the developer persona, one that's looking for an open source alternative that allows him to fulfill his goals.
An engagement mechanismIf we make it easier to bring those developers, consultants and general users on-board, they become potential contributors willing to help us building a richer ecosystem around Pentaho. If people spend their time making the tools better, competing between and helping each other, they won't even look at any competitor. They will work in order to increase the quantity and quality of the Pentaho world.
A QA environmentThe more users we have using our software, the better it will become. People will exercise the codebase under several conditions allowing us to collect more feedback that will translate into a better and more stable product for the ones that pay our salary: our customers.
An evaluation territoryEvery user is an evaluator and a potential subscriber. So the open edition has to be a quality release, the best we can possibly achieve.
An upsell mechanismWith the huge amount of installs, our open edition has a great potential as a lead generator that we need to take more advantage of.
I'm a huge fan of being open and honest. Even though we are, in our core, an open source company, we want to make as much money as the next guy! And I'm a firm believer that through open source, not only we'll get there much faster, we're also doing
"the right thing". Whatever that means - but at least it feels that way to me!
The strategy: The 3 pillarsWe actually have a plan to get there. Our strategy is based on 3 well identified components:
- Model
- Facilitator
- Distribution
Model
The
Project Maturity Classification is the central piece on a strategy that aims to use the Community as a vehicle to reach our goals faster.
The two-lane approach aims to promote innovation, clear out what is and what isn't supported and which levels of support attached to them, and clarifying to prospects / customers/ community/ etc how Pentaho leverages it's Open Source roots and how that puts us to a huge advantage compared to the rest of the competition.
Facilitator
If done correctly, the community can be a huge source of innovation.
And in order to promote that innovation, it has to be simple to build extensions to our product. The large amount of examples on PDI makes it simple for developers to develop new plugins and
Sparkl, or
Pentaho Application Builder aims to make it possible for consultants to develop those extensions on the BA server.
Distribution
The
Marketplace is the main distribution vehicle, also acting as a major motivation for partners and other companies to create these extensions. The visibility they gain drives a lot of business opportunities.
It will also allow us to apply the
early and often rule, giving users the ability to try early preview releases of our projects / plugins, acting as an extended QA team.
----------
Will it work? We'll see - If not, we'll try something else. Eventually, something will :)
-pedro
More...