In November 2011 Pentaho welcomed Rosanne Saccone to the team as Chief Marketing Officer. We caught up with Rosanne in her office in San Francisco to get to know her a little better, her background, top priorities and predictions for 2012. Welcome Rosanne!
Happy Holidays from Pentaho
December 21, 2011On behalf of the Pentaho team around the globe, I wish you and your families a very Happy Holidays and a healthy and prosperous New Year.
Although we would never claim that Business Analytics is ‘child’s play’ we invited some of our team’s kids to star in our latest marketing video to remind us all of what’s really important as we wind things down for the holiday season and turn our attention to family and friends.
Thank you very much for your continued support and we look forward to making big things happen with you in 2012!
Cheers,
Quentin
Hooked on Eye Candy
December 13, 2011
Yesterday I was quoted in an article on CBR Online by Steve Evans titled, BI visualisation is just “eye candy”: Pentaho. This hook of “eye candy” has stirred up a lot of comments and I’m pleased that Pentaho is at the center of an interesting debate!
Why pleased? It means that we are having a dialogue and I can see from your Tweets and blog post (see below) that many of you value Pentaho‘s end-to-end business analytics model that enables customers to make great business decisions fast and cost-effectively.
Tom Barber made some great points on his blog, Playing to your strengths is good for business — that we should sell to our strengths, highlighting that “Pentaho is a great at data manipulation.”
Then Pedro Alves from Webdetails says on his blog Substance AND Style that you need both – and we agree.
Let me put a bit more context around the great conversation I had with Steve last week at the Business Cloud Summit in London. We discussed areas that can limit a company’s ability to take action on the information that impacts their company’s success.
At Pentaho, we are taking out pain by automating difficult processes for both the end users AND the IT team. A modern analytics platform must offer data governance, ETL services, the full spectrum of reports, dashboards, ad-hoc analysis and data mining/predictive analytics, as well as embrace big and diverse data.
Before meeting with Steve at CBR, I had an interesting discussion in London with Alys Woodward of IDC about data governance, a process that IT people care about and is getting more complex because of all the new technologies and different data models. We care about this too, even if it does fall into the ‘hard to do’ category. Pentaho has a simple and intuitive graphical user interface to more easily move data in and out of Hadoop.
These IT services have certainly not come at the expense of visual presentation for the end user. While in London, I met with a UK enterprise CRM software provider called HTK, which is embedding our reports and analytics into his company’s software to deliver SaaS Cloud version aimed at marketing professionals, who have some of the highest standards for ease-of-use visual presentation and reporting flexibility. One of the reason’s his firm chose Pentaho was for our visually appealing data discovery, analysis and visualization tools that will enable his new SME customer to get up and running without special training or support services.
In the end the hook of ‘eye candy’ may have grabbed your attention, however, at Pentaho, we believe that both substance and style are required to drive the future of analytics. Let’s keep this dialogue and debate going in 2012.
Quentin
Pentaho News Recap Dec 5-9
December 12, 2011Last week (Dec 5-9) was an exciting week for Pentaho in the press, with analyst and customers. Here’s a short recap:
Announcements

- Pentaho Expands Big Data Support with EMC Greenplum UAP
- Pentaho Expands World Class Support - Implements Cloud-based help desk to bring faster and better global support to customers
- Subscribe to the Pentaho news RSS reader
Customers in the news
- Intelligent InSites Integrates Pentaho to Help Hospitals Improve Efficiencies with RFID and RTLS
- Fundacion Telefonica uses Pentaho to Manage its Program Against Child Labor (English and Spanish)
- Recap of customer meeting in Germany (see photo from meeting above)
- Blog by customer St. Antonius Hospital about meeting Quentin
Pentaho European Press and Analyst tour
Pentaho new CEO, Quentin Gallivan, visited five countries in five days and was able to meet with several influential press, analyst, customers and the EMEA Pentaho team. The great press from this tour is just starting to publish. Here are a few articles that have appeared:
- PublicTechnology.net – The ITCT Professional: Quentin Gallivan, Pentaho
- CBR, Steve Evans – BI visualisation is just “eye candy”: Pentaho
- DataNews on Knack.be, Guy Kindermans – Open source met diftige das
Pentaho Expands Big Data Support with EMC Greenplum UAP
December 8, 2011Today EMC Greenplum announced the industry’s next-generation platform for big data analytics—the EMC Greenplum Unified Analytics Platform (UAP). This platform combines co-processing of structured and unstructured data with a productivity engine that empowers and shatters current barriers to collaboration among data science teams.
Pentaho is proud to participate as a preferred Data Integration Partner for the EMC Greenplum UAP. A great boost for the productivity of data scientists, Pentaho plus the UAP make it easy to extract business intelligence out of unstructured data with the exact same tools and interfaces they use to access, visualize and analyze structured data.
This adds to Pentaho’s big data strategy and another step in our ongoing relationship with EMC Greenplum. Just back in May, we announced Pentaho support for the EMC® Greenplum® distribution of Hadoop, as well as native support for the Greenplum Database GPLoad (bulk loader).
A hybrid architecture that combines Hadoop with data marts and warehouses are a critical part of any effective business analytics architecture, so providing powerful and easy-to-use data integration, which is natively integrated with Hadoop, is a key piece of UAP. That’s why we believe Pentaho Data Integration is perfect for use as a part of UAP, especially as it provides the deepest available native integration with Hadoop, as well as native integration with the Greenplum Database and bulk loader.
The EMC Greenplum UAP is a giant step forward in simplifying the management, integration, and analysis of big data. It’s all about lowering the barriers to adoption, by simplifying working with big data analytics for IT, through things like providing familiar graphical interfaces for managing and analyzing big data, and orchestrating big data tasks. Then for business users, it’s about making it quick and easy for them to access and analyze big data.
Quentin
Fore more details, check out the video I recorded with the EMC Greenplum team discussing our technology and participation as a Preferred Data Integration Partner (I appear at 0:42):
Building the Future of Analytics
December 1, 2011It has been a terrific first two months at Pentaho; the excitement from our employees, customers and partners for helping Pentaho build the future of analytics has been profound.
We believe the future of analytics is all about building a modern platform that allows business users and technologists the ability to interact with their data in an easy, visual way. The consumerization of IT requires the traditional analytics functions regarding data extraction and transformation, metrics creation, ad hoc analysis and reporting to be done in a “point and click” and “drag and drop” fashion. The latest Pentaho Business Analytics release delivers on such a premise and provides “Power to the user.”
We’ve had great feedback on how IT professionals love the visual, non-programmatic way Pentaho integrates any data source from traditional relational sources such as Oracle, SAP and MySQL, to SaaS applications like Salesforce, to non-relational sources including Hadoop, NoSQL and MPP, to analytic platforms including EMC, Teradata and IBM. Plus, the ease of all ETL functions are accomplished with a simple point and click.
Business users are free to create measures, metrics and on-the-fly reports. Deep ad hoc analysis and predictive analytical features are a drag and drop away.
Another design tenant Pentaho has built for the modern analytics platform is an open architecture and plug-in framework. We understand that our customers require freedom of choice selecting databases, plug-in end user components and web services. Pentaho’s open source heritage and extensible plug-in framework allows business users and IT professionals to easily integrate preferred components to fulfill their analytical needs.
The future of analytics is ensuring that our customers can easily gain insight from emerging technology trends including big data, Cloud computing and mobility.
Pentaho has released robust big data analytics solutions, which allow customers to truly “operationalize” big data applications. Pentaho is focused on helping customers address the biggest pain points around big data as well as the challenges of getting non-relational data in and out of Hadoop and into the hands of business users who can gain insight from reporting and ad hoc analysis. We already have several customers in the media and retail verticals who have tapped into big data for market analysis, customer sentiment and website analytics using Pentaho solutions.
Our modern technology platform was designed with Cloud computing in mind. Pentaho’s service oriented architecture allows SaaS and Cloud companies to easily embed rich analytics into their applications. Customers like Marketo, ExactTarget and Cipal have enhanced their service offerings with advanced analytics for their customers. Additionally, the Pentaho suite is integrated with common platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings, including Amazon Web Services and RackSpace for customers who would prefer to run their analytic applications in the Cloud.
We constantly strive to make our products more relevant. As our customers look to empower remote employees with better insight and analytics, Pentaho has released a rich mobile solution for tablets including the iPad.
The big idea for the future of analytics is allowing customers to freely move and easily integrate analytical applications between the traditional world of transactional, relational data and the new world of web, social and device data. The ultimate goal is to provide deep business insight by enabling users to easily mash-up data from traditional relational applications, such as Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, with web and social data sitting in Hadoop and NoSQL data stores.
I would be remiss not to mention that a major business design goal for the future of analytics is price performance and value. Building on our foundation of being easy to do business with from evaluation to renewal, Pentaho is continually improving its support and services. In the past year, we have added the Customer Success Team to provide additional customer service to our direct and OEM customers worldwide, created a specialized OEM services team and enhanced our support platform by migrating to Zendesk. All of this while still delivering the future of analytics at 20 percent of the cost of traditional analytics solutions from the mega vendors!
The future of analytics is here and now with Pentaho. I look forward to the journey!
Quentin
Pentaho Scores World-Class CMO Rosanne Saccone
November 17, 2011
We are very excited to announce that we have scored a rock star Chief Marketing Officer, Rosanne Saccone. Rosanne is truly a world-class CMO with one of the best reputations and track records in the technology industry. She is responsible for Pentaho’s strategic messaging, product marketing and lead generation.
Rosanne is a seasoned marketing executive with over 20 years of results-driven marketing, management and finance experience in the high tech industry. Her career highlights include:
- Served as Vice President, Americas Enterprise Marketing at HP;
- Gained expertise in business intelligence, analytics and SaaS as CMO of Pivotlink, where she worked alongside current Pentaho CEO, Quentin Gallivan;
- Crafted strategic messaging and spearheaded all aspects of marketing as CMO and SVP at BEA Systems;
- Served as Executive Vice President of Marketing at Olliance, a consulting firm specializing in open source software;
- Graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford and received an MBA from University of Virginia.
Welcome Rosanne!
Stay tuned for a Q&A video of Rosanne.
The Rise of Analytics in Healthcare – Part 1
November 15, 2011Recently SearchHealthIT.com published a study revealing that today only 50 percent of healthcare organizations make extensive use of analytics. Yet, the rest are getting started (40 percent) or are planning to implement (10 percent) – see figure 1. This is no surprise. Like many industries, healthcare seeks to improve efficiency and reduce costs using analytics. But unlike many other industries, healthcare is a heavily regulated sector, shifting from a pay for service culture to a pay for performance approach. This requires healthcare providers to measure their quality of care performance metrics. In addition, the rise of evidence-based medicine is creating demand for analytics. Advanced analytics help providers gain scientific evidence for clinical treatments, instead of only using their conventional wisdom.
Figure 1
Among many interesting points, one interesting angle that the survey revealed is the predominant types of analytic functions that healthcare providers are looking to use in the near future. Based on this data in Figure 2, the two top analytics functions that the CIOs plan to use in the next two years include:
1. Health Information Exchange (42%)
2. Predictive Analysis of Diseases (43.6%)
Figure 2
Let’s explore the reasons behind each one:
Health Information Exchange
Historically, healthcare information systems have been built around special departmental needs. For example, a radiology department uses its own information system to log patient data, while laboratory services, patient admissions and urgent care each use their own systems to store information. This creates information silos, trapping patient data across multiple sources.
With the increasing populations of patients and higher demands for quality of care, having a single view of patients information has become much more important than what it used to be. However, because each of the information systems stores data in a particular shape, size, and format, creating a holistic view of a patient becomes increasingly harder.
To cope with this issue, HL7, a non-profit organization, has developed a set of standards for exchanging healthcare information. By using common standards, different information systems can communicate, exchange, and share information much easier.
Today HL7 is an international framework for information exchange among different healthcare organizations. More and more hospitals, health centers and medical services are adopting HL7 every day. With the growing adoption of these standards, the demand for data integration tools that can retrieve information from different repositories, parse, consolidate and transform it into these standards has become extremely high.
A vivid example of how better integration and exchange of health information has helped a healthcare organization accelerate its quality of care is St. Antonius Hospital. Based in The Netherlands and with six locations around Utrecht, St. Antonius Hospital uses Pentaho Business Analytics to build a holistic view of both hospital activities and patients. By using Pentaho as the central business analytics platform, St. Antonius was able to break down departmental silos, making data analysis available to the entire hospital staff, providing highest quality of care over a half-million patients a year.
Interested to find out how St. Antonius was able to overcome its health information challenges? Register for the webinar on December 1st: St. Antonius Hospital Improves Patient Services with Better Data Access and Analysis.
Stay tuned – in Part 2 of this blog, we will explore the reasons behind the high growth of Predictive Analysis of Diseases.
Farnaz Erfan
Product Marketing, Pentaho
Posted by rebeccapentaho 






