Pentaho Corporation is upgrading its commercial open source business intelligence alternative with a completely new report authoring environment along with technical and packaging changes so OEMs and SaaS providers can embed the widgetry into third-party applications.

It says the rev, which took 12 months to write, makes it easier for enterprises frustrated by the cost and complexity of proprietary BI to turn to Pentaho, particularly in the current economic environment.

The company also reckons it’s got a first-of-a-kind migration program to move customers off of proprietary BI solutions.

It calls it the Escape program, a fixed-price, fixed-deliverable service meant to convert reports from traditional proprietary BI tools to Pentaho for $100 a report in large volumes.

With pricing starting at $5,000 for the first 25 reports, then $100 after that, or $4,000 with Pentaho EE, the Escape program offers conversion from Actuate e.Reports, Brio, Cognos Impromptu, Crystal Reports and Oracle Reports. Pentaho figures it runs 10%-20% of the list price of the proprietary software.

It expects to take advantage of the adjustments SAP made in Business Objects pricing, ditching its per-CPU schedule in favor of named users. Although Pentaho’s replacement strategy is “going active” and scaling to meet demand, new deployments will likely remain its largest revenue driver. Report conversion is the single most common need.

There’s also a special Pentaho Reporting Embedded Edition that includes technology enhancements and step-by-step instructions along with simplified $10,000 unlimited-use pricing; no royalties; no per-CPU, no per-user, no per-customer fees.

The company says it incorporates all of the resources required by a report including query information, images, layout and templates into a single file, simplifying deployment and maintenance.

Its new Report Designer provides report authors with a streamlined report design wizard, an interactive preview mode that lets them view changes in real-time without toggling between design and preview modes and the ability to add dynamic, cascading parameters to reports in the designer.

A new thin-client report viewer lets users change parameters and output formats or jump to a specific page while viewing reports.

Its Dashboard Designer 3.5 can create new data and chart visualizations in Pentaho’s thin-client user console. The centralized metadata layer lets business users query data in business terms without knowing the underlying database structures or SQL.

Pentaho is offering free 30-day evaluations of its Enterprise Edition 3.5, which is downloadable from the company’s web site.

The company claims 600 subscription customers. It estimates it took 20 years for Hyperion to get 2,000 customers. Boyne Resorts, the third largest resort network in the US, switched to Pentaho from Crystal Reports. Loma Linda University Health Care says it’s been using the stuff for years.

Its products have reportedly been downloaded more than 5 million times

The five-year-old company is backed by three rounds of venture capital totaling $25 million.