A new challenge Webdetails joins Pentaho

A new challenge Webdetails joins Pentaho

The Announcement

Now heres a blog post that a while back I wouldnt even think about writing.

Im very happy to announce that Webdetails will join Pentaho! Heres an excerpt from the press release:

ORLANDO, FLA - April 22, 2013 � Delivering the future of analytics, Pentaho announced today that it has completed the acquisition of its Portugal-based consulting partner Webdetails. Pentaho will benefit from Webdetails� visual interface development expertise and international consulting services provided by its 20-strong team. Webdetails� founder Pedro Alves is a high-profile member of Pentaho�s open source community and will take on the new role of Senior VP, Community for Pentaho.

All the team at webdetails feel incredibly proud for the vote of confidence, and very excited to keep working as hard we can but now with the new goal of improving the pentaho platform and the community ecosystem. Oh! - wait, weve been doing that for the past 5 years! :p

The daily work of the now Portuguese pentaho crew wont change much - well still operate and provide services under the the name Webdetails (now with an additional tag a pentaho company), have our UX team rock and rolling and keep creating the ctools until we run out of letters on the alphabet.

Well just have the huge opportunity of doing this things at a much larger scale. The plan to conquer the world advances as planned!

 

The Community

I had the pleasure to make the announcement first hand in the Pentaho Day 2013, the amazing Brazilian community event that had over 180 people that chose to spend a Saturday on a room with a faulty A/C talking about a subject that unites them.

Ill take the new role of SVP of Community for Pentaho, where Ill try to be "the chief advocate and interface to Pentaho�s active open source developer community". As you may have guessed the bit on italics was copy-pasted directly from the aforementioned press release. I dont even know what that means!

As I had the opportunity to present to the audience in Brazil, the guys at pentaho that thought it would be a good idea to put me on that role have no idea whats going to happen!

This is not me

Building a community is not about going to events on tropical countries, drinking huge amounts of liquor and saying how cool pentaho is (wait, scratch the part about liquor and going to tropical countries, I do like that)

This is me!

A community doesnt exist because a company wants it to. A community is a reflex of the strategy of a company. People will only gather around a common cause - any cause - if they feel connected to it.

Ill be doing a lot of evangelization work, but not externally. Its an inside job, where Ill try to share what the community is doing, feeling, saying and fight to make that information reach the product and the strategy.

I do believe theres a lot to be done, and its not an easy task to try to achieve a good balance between the Enterprise and Community objectives, but I do believe theres lots of room for improvement!

Please feel free to come to me for any suggestions, complaints, rants, whatever. Pentaho needs to make a good job in allowing people from the community to succeed. Its the only way this works. Were not a bunch of good guys. At least Im not! Only when people feel theyre getting something theyll be willing to give something back.

Community is all about creating Opportunity!


-pedro