Thursday, 21 September 2006

Pentaho Buys the Weka Open Source Data-Mining Project

Pentaho has acquired the Weka open source data-mining project developed by the University of Waikato in New Zealand. The Pentaho and Weka teams will soon announce a road map covering their plans for enhancements including extension of Weka's analytic techniques to additional vertical industries, and integration of Weka with Pentaho's platform, data integration, and information delivery capabilities.

"Through the acquisition of the Weka project, Pentaho continues to show that there is no capability or application in the business intelligence market that can't or won't be addressed by the open source community," said Andre Boisvert, Chairman and co-founder of Pentaho.

Originally created in 1993, and available on sourceforge.net since 2000, the Weka project was established by the University of Waikato as a platform for the research and testing of machine learning techniques.

"This combination makes a lot of sense, for organisations that want a BI platform," said Dan Everett, Research Director at Ventana Research. "Recent research from Ventana shows that organisations view data mining as one of the top five most important BI platform capabilities, and data mining plays a critical role in the optimisation process of the Ventana Research PerformanceCycle methodology of 'Understand, Optimise, and Align’."

"This move comes at just the right time for our research group," said Mark Hall, Senior Lecturer and core Weka developer at Waikato University. "The Weka project has grown to the point where it needs support from a larger open source community with the resources to invest in it. Pentaho will provide an environment for further growth and development of the Weka project."

Effective immediately, the Weka project is downloadable here.