Pentaho is a full-fledged BI suite, meaning it can handle everything from reports, OLAP, dashboards, etc.

I ve only briefly dealt with the reporting side of BO, but I haven t looked to any other systems since starting to work with Pentaho three years ago. It s a very powerful system (and FOSS). There s also a very vibrant and active community. Being FOSS, Pentaho also encourages the community to contribute back. Some recent examples of this are Saiku (previously called Pentaho Analysis Tool; 1.0 is around the corner, already usable as a plugin into the BI server) and the Community Dashboard Framework (which is now a core component of the suite).

The best suggestion I can make is to download the test server from Sourceforge and start playing with the toolset. It s free, so there s no trial expiration to worry about.

Pentaho also provides support packages for both individual components and the full suite. The last time I checked the prices, it was like $2.5k for a component and $10k for up to 10 developers on a single server.

With Business objects you created Universes which are a subject oriented semantic layer on a data base. You do that with BO Designer. These universes are then used with the reporting tool by just grabbing the objects in the semantic layer. The thing is that as the Universe contents a subject oriented semantic, any user knowing the subject can easily create a report by dragging and dropping the elements of the Universe within the report. No need to know sql. Users, reports and Universes are then managed in a repository where you can defined endless combinations of security between all of it. The reporting and the security management can be done via a web app.

Additionally, you have BODS which is the ETL tool that enables the creation and feeding of the reporting databases/data warehouses/data marts/EIS/ODS/.......

There are other tools which a didn t use. I ve just used BODS (ETL), BO DESIGNER (Universes), DESKTOP INTELLIGENCE (reports) and the Central Management Console (CMC) for security.

Cheers