Pentaho is going places. By integrating its Reporting product into OpenOffice, it's actually going lots of places. Tens of millions of them. As announced today,With the integration of Pentaho’s reporting engine and the new OpenOffice.org Report Designer, developed by Sun, OpenOffice.org users will be able to create reports with content from the OpenOffice.org Base database as well as a wide range of proprietary Pentaho is going places. By integrating its Reporting product into OpenOffice, it’s actually going lots of places. Tens of millions of them. As announced today,With the integration of Pentaho’s reporting engine and the new OpenOffice.org Report Designer, developed by Sun, OpenOffice.org users will be able to create reports with content from the OpenOffice.org Base database as well as a wide range of proprietary and open source relational databases, OLAP and XML sources. For example, users will be able to generate customer invoices by creating a customer invoice template and then pulling customer names, addresses, and current due balances from an accounts receivable application or database. They can then produce the invoices as OpenOffice.org Writer documents.I think this is really cool, and demonstrates the power of the open source development and distribution model. It also fulfills the promise of open source Business Intelligence: BI for the unwashed masses. Like me. Like you. This news is also a significant seeding mechanism for Pentaho. Why? Consider:OpenOffice is one of the world’s most widely-deployed, business-user-facing open source applications, estimated at 40 million users worldwide (80 million cumulative downloads) and growing, making the market-seeding scale of this agreement roughly an order of magnitude larger for Pentaho Reporting than Crystal Reports’ embedding within Microsoft Visual Basic / Visual Studio), and OpenOffice also ships with the top 5 Linux distributions including Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical/Ubuntu and others.In short, Pentaho Reporting is going places. Lots of places. (It’s actually a very clever way of getting into the top Linux distributions, which is difficult feat otherwise.) Through this distribution mechanism, of course, Pentaho will really have to prove itself: if the product isn’t easy to use, it won’t help the company’s ambitions any. But assuming that it works as advertised and easily, it will be a significant boost for the company in the market as users will get a taste for its basic reporting through OpenOffice, and will turn to Pentaho for more advanced BI requirements (or for support on existing requirements). Smart move. Open Source