A new research report published by BeyeNETWORK analyzes people’s use of open source BI. It is gratifying to see Pentaho, and Pentaho projects Mondrian and Kettle, at the top of their categories. Weka, another Pentaho project, is a a narrow second to R for statistics/data mining.

With 1,000 respondents in small, medium and large companies, this is not a small survey. Pentaho’s dominance across several categories makes Jaspersoft’s recent claim to be the most widely deployed BI software pretty difficult to believe.

Pentaho’s strategy has been to build a suite of best-of-breed open source components, foster those components and their communities, and integrate them into a design-time and run-time platform. This report shows that this strategy is paying off.

The paper covers the bad stuff (performance problem areas, barriers to adoption) as well as the good, and surveys the information sources that people found useful in troubleshooting and getting to successful deployments. If you are evaluating open source BI products, the paper is well worth a read.