Pentaho, a commercial open-source business intelligence vendor, has acquired LucidEra's Web-based interactive reporting tools for non-technical business users.

Pentaho on Monday said LucidEra's Clearview product would be packaged as Pentaho Analyzer Enterprise Edition. The software will be offered as the front-end interface of Pentaho's on-premise and cloud-based analytics product line. Financial details were not disclosed

LucidEra in June acknowledged that a sale of its assets was possible due to the company's inability to raise venture capital in the economic downturn. In the opinion of some industry observers, LucidEra offered a fairly narrow forecast-to-billing application that was most useful to Salesforce.com customers.

Pentaho and JasperSoft are the leading open-source BI suite vendors. Pentaho offers a community, open-source edition of its product and an enterprise edition that's extended with non-open-source components. The company released a major upgrade of its suite in March.

LucidEra's inability to remain viable as a SaaS BI vendor led to speculation on whether the model was adaptable to BI. However, SaaS vendors that take a broader view about sharing and analyzing data continue to offer alternatives to on-premise software. Those companies include CrystalReports.com, PivotLink, Oco, and Birst.

Pentaho and other commercial open-source vendors have increased the capabilities of their products while marketing them as far less expensive than closed-source applications. However, open-source BI in general is years behind "in delivering solutions adapted to the needs of particular employees and business domains, and in providing robust, mature end-user tools," Seth Grimes, an analytics strategist with Alta Plana, said in a recent report published by Intelligent Enterprise, a BI-focused site on the InformationWeek business technology network.

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