Multiple iPad Giveaway From ‘Agile’ BI Company

Open source business intelligence (BI) company Pentaho is giving away iPads to raise its profile as a competitor to BI offerings from Microsoft and other companies. Meanwhile, eWEEK Europe offers an easier-to-enter prize draw for one.

The Define Agile competition invites people to tell Pentaho, by Friday 30 April, “what you think when you hear the word ‘Agile’ around the concept of business intelligence”. Apparently, entries can be in text, video, song or interptretive dance, and must be submitted by email, YouTube or just using the online form. They’ll be judged on the “clarity, creativity and completeness” of their answer, to collect five finalists, with the grand prize winner chosen in an online vote.

Win an iPad

Pentaho has established itself as a success story in the BI field with an open source product that competes against products like Microsoft’s Sharepoint. It has gained support for the idea of open source BI from analyst Gartner which predicts the field will grow 500 percent in the next two years.

However, Pentaho shares a problem with other open source players, such as Alfresco in content management, or Sugar CRM: how to raise user awareness of an open source company, in a somwhat ill-defined field of application software, without the massive marketing budgets deployed by Microsoft and others.

The Pentaho contest is a bid to leap that hurdle, and make its name more visible, but the contest faced one further problem: how could the company persuade journalists to mention it?  The company has come up with a simple but (evidently) effective answer. It has one more iPad, ready to give away to a random journalist chosen from amongst those willing to write up the story. And yes, this now includes eWEEK Europe.

For those who want a chance to win an iPad, without having to post a YouTube video of an interpretive dance performance attempting to give relevance to an over-used buzzword applied to an over-estimated software category, you can still enter our own prize draw to win an iPad by subscribing to our newsletter.