7 Things to Ask When Looking for Self-Service Analytics for Big Data Stores

December 18, 2012

Self-service analytics – the ability for non-technical business users to intuitively perform ad hoc reporting and analysis on business data residing in corporate databases and spreadsheets has been a staple of BI and business analytics tools for years.  However, these traditional tools simply don’t work against the new breed of “big data” platforms such as Hadoop and NoSQL databases, which have rejected the traditional relational SQL interface in return for massive scalability and the flexibility to store unstructured data.

Meanwhile, some new specialized but limited big data analytics tools have been released to the market, that are designed specifically to work with the new breed of big data platforms.

So what are the questions you should be asking when looking to provide your data analysts and business users easy self-service analytics for big data platforms such as Hadoop, MongoDB, Cassandra or HBase?

1.Do you have more than one kind of big data store, for example Hadoop as well as HBase, MongoDB or Cassandra?

A:   Chances are you do, or will in the future, to take advantage of the relative strengths of these big data platforms. Consider the fact that most new “big data analytics” tools are capable of self-service analytics against a single big data platform, most often just Hadoop.

2.Would you prefer to use the same tool for big data stores in addition to your traditional relational data stores?

A:   Most new big data analytics tools can only access the big data platform they were designed for, and force you to load data from traditional stores into the big data store. For example, they force you to move data from a low-latency relational database into high-latency (but of course massively scalable) Hadoop, or hard-to-query Cassandra or MongoDB. This makes no sense.

3. Are you ok waiting minutes or even hours to access your big data?

A:   Many traditional BI tools have taken the lowest common denominator type of approach to integrating with big data platforms, for example using Hive with Hadoop. These “batch oriented” interfaces make it impossible to perform speed-of-thought analysis – it’s likely you’ve forgotten the question you asked by the time the data comes back.

4. Are you ok using a spreadsheet-like interface to access and analyze your data?

A:  This, plus maybe basic dashboards, is all that most of the new breed of big data analytics tools offer.  Most business users are much more comfortable using a much more intuitive drag & drop graphical interface for interacting and visualizing their data across different dimensions and measures. For example, many users are stumped when it comes to typing in arcane spreadsheet formulae to work with their data.

5. Do you need complete BI capabilities, including reporting, interactive visualization, and predictive analytics?

A: Most new big data analytics tools offer just a basic subset of these capabilities – for example a spreadsheet-like interface and some lightweight dashboard visualizations.  They don’t let you build highly formatted reports, drag & drop data items in a graphical data visualization interface, or make predictions based on prior history.

6. Do you need to enrich your big data with data from outside of the big data platform?

A: Most big data platforms simply leave it up to you to do this manually, or at best force you to inefficiently load copies of the enrichment data, for example customer demographic attributes such as age, income and location, into your big data platform.

7. Is the big data you want to analyze bigger than the amount of memory you have available?

A: Some new big data analytics tools resolve the big data access latency issue by copying data into an in-memory data store. This works well when the data volumes are low, but blows-up when your data is bigger than your memory. Does the big data analytics tool provide alternatives to in-memory, such as switching to a more scalable and high-performance MPP or columnar analytic database as the speed-of-thought data cache?

Here at Pentaho, we are striving to provide the industry’s most mature and comprehensive big data analytics product, and we think you’ll like our answers we have to every one of the questions listed above.

Let me know what you think. Leave a comment below or @ian_fyfe

Ian Fyfe
Big Data Product Marketing
Pentaho

Instaview

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Posted by itsmetess

Big Data Speeds Across the Chasm

December 14, 2012

Last week I visited our European team and met with customers, prospects, press and analysts to learn and talk about big data. My week in Europe confirmed my belief that we are definitely in the right business at the most exciting possible time. In a region that is rife with economic challenges, my conversations were optimistic and inspiring.

Seasoned industry people will be familiar with Geoffrey Moore’s famous curve showing the phases of technology adoption, in which the toughest challenge is ‘crossing the chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. With some technologies, this journey can take years. Many never make it across.

Technology Adoption Lifecycle

After speaking to me and executives from MapR, Cloudera and ParAccel, Brian McKenna of Computer Weekly proposes in his article “Big data analytics set to confound conventional adoption curve in UK” that big data adoption is moving relatively fast in the UK and Europe. The UK industry analyst Clive Longbottom, who I met with, reinforced this saying that big data adoption in the UK was only three months behind the US.

Of course the real proof is in what customers are doing. During my visit, our customer Carsten Bomsdorf of Travian Games presented at the Big Data Analytics conference in London about how his company uses Pentaho to analyze the behavior of its 140 million gamers to continuously innovate its award-winning products. And in marked contrast to last year, every single European customer and prospect I met with was either executing or actively planning for big data analytics.

Why is the adoption curve for big data moving faster than other technologies, even in Europe’s more traditionally risk and hype-averse markets? The answer is economic urgency. Big data analytics has demonstrated that it can help companies identify new revenue streams – even needles in haystacks – regardless of the economic climate. Quite simply big data is the ultimate tool for matching supply with demand.

If Europe’s enthusiasm for big data is anything to go on, I have to conclude that 2013 really will be the year that it starts to enter mainstream production. Fasten your seat belts – it’s going to be a wild ride!

Quentin Gallivan, CEO, Pentaho

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Posted by quentingallivan

Impala – A New Era for BI on Hadoop

November 30, 2012

With the recent announcement of Impala, also known as Cloudera Enterprise RTQ (Real Time Query), I expect the interest in and adoption of Hadoop to go from merely intense to crazy.  We applaud Cloudera’s investment in creating Impala as it moves Hadoop a huge step forward in making Hadoop accessible using existing BI tools.

What is Impala?  Simply put, it enables all of the SQL-based BI and business analytics tools that have been built over the past couple of decades to now work directly on top of Hadoop, providing interactive response times not previously attainable with Hadoop, and many times faster than Hive, the existing SQL-like alternative. And Impala provides pretty complete SQL support, including join and aggregate functions – must-have functions for analytics.

For enterprises this analytic query speed and expressiveness is huge – it means they are now much less likely to need to extract data out of Hadoop and load it into a data mart or warehouse for interactive visualization.  Instead they can use their favorite business analytics tool directly against Hadoop. But of course only Pentaho provides the integrated end-to-end data integration and business analytics capability for both ingesting and processing data inside of Hadoop, as well as interactively visualizing and analyzing Hadoop data.

Over the past few months Cloudera and Pentaho have been partnering closely at all levels including marketing, sales and engineering.  We are proud of the role we played in assisting Cloudera with validating and testing Impala against realistic BI workloads and use cases.  Based on the extremely strong interest we’ve seen, as evidenced by the lines at our booth at the recent Strata big data conference in New York City, the combination of Pentaho’s visual development and interactive visualization for Hadoop with the break-through performance of Cloudera Impala is very compelling for a huge number of enterprises.

- Ian Fyfe, Chief Technology Evangelist, Pentaho

Impala

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Posted by itsmetess

Going mobile this year? What’s your biggest big data challenge?

November 16, 2012

We received insightful responses to the polls from our “Mobile and Big Data go Instant and Interactive” webinars about the challenges users of all types face with business analytics. The complexity of data integration, lack of skills and resources, and the need to analyze unstructured data are the most significant big data challenges identified for over 80% of attendees. 50% of our attendees either have a current mobile BI solution in place or plan to in the future.

What does this mean for the future of analytics? Whether mobilizing your sales force or empowering data analysts to discover meaning from data in Hadoop, a complete business analytics solution must address the business pressures of a continual inundation of data and the need to access and interact with that data instantly in simple, familiar ways.

Not surprising that the response to Pentaho’s Business Analytics 4.8 has been overwhelmingly positive — the best of analytics offered up in a mobile optimized experience for business users and Instaview broadening big data access to data analysts for data discovery.

If you missed out on our webinar, access the on demand recording at:

Watch the Pentaho 4.8 On-Demand Webinar

Data Integration and business analytics in a single, unified, modern platform — Pentaho is the future of analytics

Let me know what you think about Pentaho 4.8.

Donna Prlich

Director, Product Marketing

Pentaho

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Posted by itsmetess

Looking to the Future of Business Analytics with Pentaho 4.8

November 12, 2012

Last week Pentaho announced Pentaho 4.8, another milestone in delivering the future of analytics. It has been an exciting ride. Our partners’ and our customers’ feedback have kept us ecstatic and ready to excel further into the future.

Pentaho 4.8 is a true testament on what the future of analytics needs. The future of analytics is driven by the data problems that businesses face every day – and is dependent on the information users and their expectations for solving those problems.

Let me give you a good example. I recently had the pleasure to meet with one of our customers – BeachMint. BeachMint is a fashion and style ecommerce company who uses celebrities / celebrity stylists to promote its retail business.

This rapidly growing online retailer needed to keep tabs on its large twitter and facebook communities to track customer sentiment and social influence. It then uses the social data to define customer cohorts and design marketing campaigns that best target each cohort.

For BeachMint insight to data is extremely important. But on one hand, the volumes and variety of data – in this case unstructured social data and click-through ad feeds – has increased its complexity. And on the other hand, the speed in which it gets created has accelerated rapidly. For example, in addition to analyzing the impact of customer sentiments on their purchasing behavior, BeachMint also needed to gain up-to-the-minute information on the activity of key promotional codes – to immediately identify those that leak out.

Pentaho understands these data challenges and user expectations. In this release Pentaho takes full advantage of its tightly coupled Data Integration and Business Analytics platform – to simplify data exploration, discovery and visualization for all users and all data types – and to deliver this information to users immediately – sometimes even at a micro-second level. In this release Pentaho delivers:

- Pentaho Mobile – the only Mobile BI application with the power to instantly create new analysis on the go.

- Pentaho Instaview – the industry’s first instant and interactive big data visualization application.

Want to find out more? Register for Pentaho 4.8 webinar and see for yourself.

- Farnaz Erfan, Product Marketing, Pentaho

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Posted by Farnaz Erfan

A Day of Choices that Impact the Future

November 6, 2012

The timing is auspicious for the launch of Pentaho’s latest business analytics platform release, which coincides with Election Day in the U.S.!  Both events offer the freedom to choose a platform that is right for you today and into the future. The election platforms offer social, economic and political philosophies to help you meet your personal values and goals. Your choice of business analytics platform should improve your organization’s performance by liberating and integrating all your data and serving it up to your corporate citizens to analyze.

We trust that you’ve made the choice of political candidates and cast your vote today. In case you haven’t chosen your business analytics platform yet, we hope you’ll allow us a little more campaigning! Our business analytics ‘candidate,’ which tightly couples data integration with advanced analytics, has proven its value across private, public and nonprofit sector organizations around the globe. Today, with the launch of our latest version Pentaho Business Analytics 4.8, we have made great strides in democratizing big data and business analytics by adding some exciting new capabilities:

  • Pentaho’s Instaview, the industry’s first instant and interactive big data analytics application, dramatically reduces the time and complexity required for data analysts to discover, visualize and explore big and diverse data
  • Pentaho Mobile BI brings the full power of the Pentaho Business Analytics Platform to the iPad, including instant and interactive visualization and the power to create new analysis on the go

With Pentaho 4.8, we bring real freedom to deliver power to all business users and a clear choice for a better future in the world of business analytics. To learn more about the future of business analytics, check out Pentaho.com/48.

Rosanne Saccone
Chief Marketing Officer
Pentaho

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Posted by rebeccapentaho

Because You Don’t Have Time to F* Around.

November 5, 2012

At Pentaho we are confident that we are providing the most complete solution for big data analytics. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t always room for improvement — that is where you come in. The big data market is rapidly growing and evolving and we want to ensure we are at the forefront.

Pentaho invites you to participate in our first Big Data Product Strategy Survey. The survey only takes 3 – 5 minutes, can be taken anonymously and you will automatically be entered to win a $100 American Express gift card!*

Click here to take the survey now and help Pentaho provide the big data product that meets your needs – because you are busy and don’t have time to f* around with your big data!

*you must enter your email address at the end of the survey to be contacted to receive your gift card or copy of the final report.

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Posted by itsmetess

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