Pentaho Business Analytics Blog

My mother always told me that first impressions mean everything. I believe this theory is also the same for companies. I could talk to you all day about the value and benefits of our technology, services and company standards, but at the end of the day you probably have a few minutes to explore what Pentaho is all about.

We are very excited to unveil a new and improved version of a Pentaho product “Test Drive.”  Take a look at our “Try Pentaho Now” page to:

• Get to know Pentaho in under 2 minutes – watch the Pentaho Business Analytic video
• Test drive Pentaho through a new hands-on, download free product experience to learn about Pentaho through tutorials, videos and samples to “read, watch and do” to learn about Pentaho.

We think you will leave impressed with Pentaho!

Let us know what you think….

Donna Prlich
Director, Product Marketing
Pentaho

As I approach the end of my first year as Pentaho’s CEO, I’ve being reflecting on two things: one, the exceptional opportunity that big data analytics presents to individual companies and the global economy and two, my good fortune in having joined such a courageous and visionary team of people. As you start planning for 2013, I wanted to take a few minutes to share some of my reflections.

Let me start with the opportunity. Many Western economies that we do business in have struggled this year, from 25 percent unemployment levels in Spain to double-dip recession in the UK to disappointing job growth in the US. And yet in the past year at Pentaho, we achieved record growth overall, with the last quarter being our best ever for big data sales.

Economists advocate the urgent need for growth but as many countries have learned the hard way, growth doesn’t arise simply from cost-cutting or producing more of the same, but in intelligently creating new demand.

And that’s precisely where big data analytics comes in.  Big data analytics, with its potential to tap into the staggering wealth of online and corporate data, is empowering companies to identify new revenue opportunities and use precious resources more profitably and more sustainably.

Our customer stories prove that this opportunity is no pipe dream – whether it’s German-based developer Travian Games, which uses Pentaho to analyses usage patterns from 120 million gamers to innovate its products or Shareable Ink, an enterprise cloud application provider that analyses and presents critical, document-based information to health care professionals in order to improve patient care.  These companies are outmaneuvering and outpacing their competitors in very crowded, saturated markets.  And new uses cases for big data analytics are emerging all the time, like clickstream analysis in online retailing and device analytics in IT departments.

One of the biggest revelations for me this year has been hearing prospective customers tell me how hard it is it to work with big data technology.  With amazing foresight, our product development team decided several years ago to take ‘the road less travelled’ in business intelligence and prioritized solving the most complex aspects of data integration for customers.  This laid the foundation for our early leadership in big data analytics.  Kenneth Wrife from our Swedish partner Omicron summed it up best when he said, “data visualization is of course necessary, but also something of a commodity.  The hardest part of data integration is extracting data from a variety of different types of sources and assimilating that data so that it is ready to be analyzed.  That’s what Pentaho does better than any other vendor’.

However, don’t imagine for a second that we’re resting on our laurels.  In order for big data analytics to ‘cross the chasm’ into mainstream adoption, we aim to make it much easier for ordinary business users, data analysts and data scientists to work with.  It also needs to be more accessible to the growing range SaaS-deployed applications on mobile devices, especially tablets.  Without giving the game away, I can promise you that you will see some very exciting new developments unfolding in these areas in the fourth quarter.

We’d love to hear from you if you are defying the global economic slump and using big data analytics to identify new sources of value for your company.  We hope you like what you see in Q4 and, as ever, thanks for your continued support.

Quentin

Data innovation is all the buzz these days. With the emergence of brand new, exciting technologies, the founders of Techweek in Chicago and the Data 2.0 Summit in San Francisco are putting together DataWeek 2012 from September 22-27  in order to spawn collaboration and conversation about how data innovation is affecting the ways our society works. An exciting part of the conference is the Data Week Awards. Pentaho has the opportunity to win in two categories!

If you have benefited from using Pentaho, we have a small favor to ask in a return…..Please vote Pentaho to win an award for our Business Intelligence and Big Data capabilities. It takes just a few moments to register to vote and we would greatly appreciate your support!

We are trying to win in two categories. Please click below to vote!

Business Intelligence: http://ow.ly/criFQ 

Big Data: http://ow.ly/ckBR9 (currently we are one of the top contenders in this category)

Thanks for your help!

If you haven’t heard yet, the 2012 Pentaho Community Meetup is coming up next month on September 28th-30th in beautiful Amsterdam.

Here are my top three reasons why you should attend:

1. Access to Pentaho product and engineering teams – hang out with project founders and architects Julian Hyde, Matt Casters, and Thomas Morgner; Community activists and development/product leads Luc Boudreau, Roland Bauman. Jens Bleuel, and Slawomir Chodnicki; And Pentaho Alumni Doug Moran (Founder and Big Data Lead) and Jake Cornelius (VP of Products and Engineering).
2. ##IRC in real life – This is an event for the community and by the community with a format similar to BarCamp. Sessions are being proposed now on topics such as: Pentaho and Big Data, in-depth look at CTools, Hands on with the PDI SDK, Mondrian 4.0 BETA, the Antonius Project, and much more. Click here if you would like to propose a talk or just follow along.
3. It’s in Amsterdam – I personally know it’s sometimes hard to pull away from the computer but the weekend is not just content packed but there also is plenty of time scheduled for fun including drinks and dinners at hot spots in downtown Amsterdam and a cruise down the canal.

Pentaho has a deep appreciation of its open source roots and would like to thank all its community members for their on going participation into making Pentaho Business Analytics the best product it can be. Additionally, we would like to extend a special thank you to the coordinators of this years community gathering: Jos van Dogen and Aly van Zalk.

To get more information and register for this year’s conference please go to http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/COM/Community+Meetup+Amsterdam+2012.

Hope to see you in September!

Michelle Bradbury
Director of Products

The photo above is from the 2011 Community Meetup in Rome