Aster Data Systems announced a strategic partnership with Pentaho that combines product integration, certification, and services. The two companies will also partner on joint sales and marketing efforts.

Aster will provide its Aster nCluster analytic database to work in conjunction with Pentaho open source business intelligence (BI) products, to enable customers to collect and analyze large volumes of data for deep analysis and reporting. Now with Pentaho and Aster, companies looking for faster and more frequent analysis of their business on rapidly increasing amounts of data have a commercial open source alternative for BI. The combined offering delivers deeper business insights to users more quickly and broadly with a database management system (DBMS) that can easily and cost-effectively scale to keep pace with exploding data volumes in organizations.

“Organizations today are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to managing the exponential growth in volumes of data and the need to access and analyze it. At the same time, costs to manage and maintain it are growing just as fast while most IT organizations are strapped with technology suppliers who are raising their license and maintenance fees instead of lowering them,” said Mark Smith, CEO and EVP of Research at Ventana Research. “Aster Data Systems and Pentaho are partnering together to provide simpler and easier to manage technologies that can deliver much needed enterprise-scale data warehousing and BI functionality dramatically faster at an effective TCO.”

“Aster nCluster is a great asset for Pentaho open source BI products, allowing organizations to address their full spectrum of business intelligence needs, with enterprise-class performance and scalability on commodity hardware. We are delighted to welcome Aster Data Systems to the Pentaho Partner Program,” said Lance Walter, vice president, marketing.

“This is an important partnership for Aster – creating a strong BI ecosystem for our customers who want choices for analyzing data within Aster nCluster,” said Mayank Bawa, CEO and co-founder of Aster Data Systems. “By partnering with a leading company like Pentaho, we bring together Aster’s strength in easy to manage, Internet-scale data warehouses with Pentaho’s broad business intelligence suite. We can now jointly offer customers a reliable and cost-effective alternative to manage and analyze rapidly growing data volumes.”

For more information on Aster Data Systems contact Leah McLean, lmclean@vocecomm.com at Voce Communications.