Attention channel partners: turn big data into big money!

October 8, 2012

In Europe, where about half our sales come through the channel, I’m seeing some interesting opportunities for our partners to profit from the big data revolution that I wanted to share. The good news is that the customer demand is already here.

One is in providing expert professional services to help customers plan and implement big data solutions. Within this area, one of the biggest opportunities is in tool selection. There’s a dizzying array of big data technology on the market, much of which is unfamiliar to customers. For example, there are at least ten NoSQL databases, so which one should they pick? And how should they further complete their big data architecture? Customers are looking for some hands-on guidance.

Another opportunity I am seeing is within partners that are embedding our analytics software to provide big data solutions ‘as-a-service’. These partners offer to pull data from Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds and other sources, perform the advanced analytics on that data and finally serve up that data as a service to their clients. We are seeing a number of marketing software providers that offer these types of services to companies on a subscription basis

You can read more about my observations on how customers are benefitting from big data here in this recent article in the UK channel magazine Microscope.

What will help improve your chances of success?

First, don’t try to boil the ocean! Focus on the needs of a specific industry. Big data uses cases differ massively even between retail banks and wholesales banks, so channel organisations really need to focus on tailored solutions to gain credibility.

Next, avoid the ‘big bang’ approach. Get customers warmed up with big data by proving the value of big data through small pilot projects using a couple of data sources that return specific and measurable outcomes. After the first stage is completed, identify new opportunities and goals and plan the next incremental stage. This allows the customer to become acquainted with the new technologies and processes along the way without being overwhelmed. Customers today want to see results quickly and have little appetite for long term development projects.

Our full Business Analytics platform is the ideal tool for this big data ‘warm up’ process. First you can tackle the data integration challenges using our Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) software. PDI makes big data technologies much easier to use.  Its visual design tool significantly lowers the barriers to getting started with big data by cutting out the complex scripting and coding tasks.

From there you can immediately visualise the results with our underlying analytics engine. That way you can iteratively work your way to a solution that will prove valuable to the customer immediately. If you want to learn more about our big data solutions go to pentahobigdata.com

I hope this has convinced you that the big data revolution stands to offer you some real revenue opportunities today. If you’re an IT channel organisation and would like to know more or you’re a partner with a story to tell, please get in touch!

Davy Nys
VP EMEA & APAC, Pentaho
Twitter @davynys

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Posted by rebeccapentaho

Big Data Panelmania

September 21, 2012

From sea to shining sea, Pentaho leaders will be busy with big data discourse during two panel discussions on Tuesday, September 25th. In San Francisco, Chief Technology Evangelist Ian Fyfe will weigh in on what makes data visualization the hot, must-have big data tool. Later in the day, founder Richard Daley will the discuss the effects (and the challenges) big data technology has on business intelligence. He’ll also discuss why SMBs shouldn’t feel left out of what big data has to offer. We’d love to see you at either panel (or even both, if you have one of these).

The Details:

What: DataWeek panel on “Why is Data Visualization Insanely Popular”
Where: San Francisco
When: Tuesday, September 25th, 12pm/pt
Join Us: http://www.dataweek.co/index/conferencespeaker/event/23

What: Enterprise Insights panel on “Go Big (Data) Or Go Home”
Where: 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York City
When: Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 6pm/et
Join Us: http://www.nybimeetup.org/events/78002042/?eventId=78002042&action=detail

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Posted by rebeccapentaho

What Makes Pentaho Hot

September 18, 2012

At Pentaho we’re proud to be named a “hot” vendor in Ventana Research’s new 2012 Value Index for Data Integration. Inclusion in this category assures buyers that the Pentaho Business Analytics platform delivers optimal value, product maturity and superior customer support according to Ventana’s comprehensive evaluation of more than a dozen vendors.

For Pentaho, the research validates that to deliver the future of analytics you need tightly coupled data integration and business analytics. What makes heat grids and other powerful data visualizations in the Pentaho Business Analytics platform “hot” is the data integration behind them. According to Ventana’s Benchmark research, 55% of organizations identify data integration as a critical component of their information management strategies.

Don’t get me wrong, we love being recognized for the ‘brains behind our beauty‘ and the ‘substance behind our sizzle.’  An integrated platform with Data Integration and Business Analytics is the future of analytics…now that’s HOT.

Let us know what you think.

Donna Prlich
Director, Product Marketing
Pentaho

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Posted by donnaprlich

Pentaho update to BBBT

July 24, 2012

Pentaho had the privilege of briefing the Boulder BI Brain Trust (BBBT) on July 20, 2012. The Boulder BI Brain Trust is a gathering of leading BI analysts, experts, and practitioners who attend half-day presentations from interesting and innovative BI vendors. After a very interactive morning presenting to the group, Pentaho CEO, Quentin Gallivan and SVP of Products, Jake Cornelius sat down with Claudia Imhoff, president and founder of the BBBT to discuss some of her questions from the morning about Pentaho.

The result is an excellent update about Pentaho products, technology and overall direction. Listen to a podcast of this interview to learn the following about Pentaho:

  • How Pentaho is differentiated?
  • What are the market forces for business analytics and how are they converging?
  • How is Pentaho meeting changes in market?
  • Overview of the Pentaho platform
  • What’s the reason for the BI embedded analytics trend?
  • What are some Pentaho big data customer examples?
  • What’s in the near future for Pentaho and its products?

Listen now: Claudia Imhoff interview with Pentaho leaders Quentin Gallivan, CEO and Jake Cornelius, SVP of Products

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Posted by rebeccapentaho

Are You?

June 15, 2012

You might be a badass… but are you a big data badass??

Happy Friday!

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Posted by rebeccapentaho

Pentaho Joins Dell Partner Program for Big Data

June 13, 2012

The opportunity that big data analytics provides for organizations to innovate quickly, predict events and improve customer relationships is endless. Our own customers including Shareable Ink, Travian Games and TravelTainment are using big data analytics today to analyze clinical data, innovate computer games and design targeted promotional campaigns – just to name a few.

Two key themes in of our vision for the future of analytics are to integrate with the leading technology partners in the big data analytics ecosystem and to enable cloud-ready applications.  In light of this, I am incredibly pleased to announce that today Pentaho is part of Dell’s Emerging Solutions Ecosystem, a new partnership program announced last April with the aim of focusing on cloud and big data enablement.

Pentaho’s big data analytics software will be offered with the Dell Apache Hadoop Solution, which brings together Cloudera’s distribution of Apache Hadoop, Dell’s hardware reference architecture and Dell’s Crowbar software, which automates and accelerates the deployment, configuration and ongoing operation of your cloud or cluster environment. The combined solution will also be offered with joint services and support.

What does this mean? I’ve had many conversations this year with customers who’ve told us they need to ‘operationalize’ Hadoop and that’s exactly what this partnership is about.  In a nutshell, this partnership makes it faster and easier for organizations to gain total insight from all their data through a single appliance that combines Hadoop integration, data integration and out-of-the-box analytics.

Why did Dell select Pentaho to be part of the Dell Apache Hadoop Solution? A major factor is that we were one of the first movers in the space announcing support for Big Data in May 2010 and we have many customers doing real work with big data.  We’ve also been working with Cloudera since October 2010 and have a longstanding strategic relationship with them, which includes technology integration.

The partnership means that Dell’s dedicated, big data sales team will now be reselling Pentaho directly into existing and new Dell accounts, initially in North America and other parts of the world very soon.  The Dell partnership also further commercializes Pentaho’s relationship with Cloudera by providing a vehicle to bring a big data offering to the market.

We look forward to helping you achieve your business goals through this important new partnership. For more information about Pentaho and Dell’s Emerging Solutions Ecosystem please visit pentaho.com/big-data/dell/.

Quentin

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Posted by quentingallivan

Big Data Bubbles Up Trouble!

May 16, 2012

Today Big Data has made the impossible, possible. Collecting and analyzing unstructured data types such as social media data, web click streams, network and data center logs is no longer a daunting task. While Hadoop and MapReduce are the technologies behind the scenes to crunch massive volumes of data, advanced visualizations have become the art that show us the best (and worst) parts about our data.

Out of all types of different visualization styles, bubble charts are unique in the sense that they allow you to show hundreds of individual values at once! They are the perfect visualization for showing data sets that have a high degree of distribution in their frequency. Let me give you a couple examples:

Example # 1 - A call center looking at hourly tickets, on a week by week basis, to understand what issues cause the most service calls. Optimizing the call center performance requires analyzing average call duration as well as call wait times, for each service issue. This can be 1000s of calls every hour of every day. How you graph this? With a bubble chart that shows:

  • X axis – days of the week
  • Y axis – hours of the day
  • Color of the bubbles – reason for the call / service issue
  • Size of the bubbles – quantity of calls or call duration or call wait time

Example # 2 – A marketing organization looking to improve its branding and customer sentiment. What is the best way to visualize their online presence such as tweets as well as other social media sentiments?

  • X axis – previous week vs. current week, for a week over week analysis
  • Y axis – their company and their major competitors
  • Color of the bubbles – keywords such as “bad quality” or “crash”
  • Size of the bubbles – volumes (# of tweets) or the intensity of the sentiment (e.g. “hate”, “worst”, “like”, “love”, etc.)

Want to see this in action? Check out this 3 minute video to find out how a bubble chart can help you visualize your data.

What are your data troubles? Do you have the Big Data technology and the advanced visualizations required to see it? I would love to hear more use cases of this visualization. So, drop me a line at @farnazerfan or leaving a comment below.

Farnaz Erfan
Product Marketing
Pentaho

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Posted by Farnaz Erfan

BI and DI finally connecting both sides of the building

April 24, 2012

I was musing the other day with a colleague about the early days of data warehousing. We reflected on how more than 20 years ago, the effort to get data into one place for analysis was mind-boggling. Then, analyzing the data in a warehouse was an even bigger challenge. For the most part these were two separate topics, two sets of users – IT and business users sitting in opposite sides of a building.

In many ways we are continually faced with the same problem, bringing together a growing variety and volume of data from flat files and delivering it to the business users who need it and support their tools of choice.  It is too easy to focus on one side of the building and not the other. A unique differentiator for Pentaho is that we focus on both sides of the building. Evolving as an open source company, continuing to innovate and never losing sight of how Business Intelligence and Data Integration should not and cannot be separated — the two are simply “better together.”

With the release of Pentaho Business Analytics 4.5 GA today, we continue to tightly couple business intelligence and data integration in an open, integrated platform. The new visualization features included in this release, such as geo-mapping, heat grids and scatterplots, allow our users to interactively analyze data through pictures and graphics, without leaving behind the need to analyze disparate data sources. Plus, we added new big data support and a set of online resources to help overcome technical barriers to big data adoption. For software and SaaS companies, we added a pluggable and extensible interface to easily add third-party visualizations.

The result? IT and line of business coexist. IT controls infrastructure and business users get the data they need with the tools they want. This is an idea planted in the beginning by Pentaho’s founders eight years ago. Since then the team has been busy building the platform and growing the customer and community to deliver the future of analytics — BI and DI together in a modern unified platform. Simply put — Pentaho is business analytics that work.

Take a look at the cool new visualization and big data features in Pentaho Business Analytics 4.5 and see for yourself…we’d like to hear from our IT and business users to see what you think! Let us know by leaving a comment below.

Donna Prlich
Director, Product and Solutions Marketing at Pentaho

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Posted by donnaprlich

Customer Success with Pentaho: TravelTainment

February 29, 2012

Think about the last time you went to book travel online. Do you remember the number of searches you conducted? Options you compared? Transactions you made? You probably are not aware of the terabytes of data you have created from your search that the online travel platform you are using has to process. Like most end users you are just interested in a tool that is easy to use and produces fast results.

Pentaho customer, TravelTainment is very familiar with this use case as a leading provider of software solutions for the travel industry. TravelTainment’s solutions are integrated with major international travel portals across Europe such as opodo.de, tui.de, expedia.co.uk and thomascook.fr, as well as thousands of travel agencies in more than 30 countries.

With the continually booming online travel market, TravelTainment’s different clients such as tour operators and travel portals, require more insight into their data and reporting to help them plan promotions and other services. Before using Pentaho, the company had acquired a set of legacy systems that had grown around individual products with only limited reporting capabilities. As a result, reporting was inefficient and time consuming for IT.

TravelTainment chose Pentaho Business Analytics for its self-service reporting and ability to manage big data sets. It enables enrichment, reporting, analysis and visualization of TravelTainments very large data volumes in such a way that also non-technical users can easily understand them. With the new solution, the company runs reports three times faster and with more flexibility than before and can now, for the first time, offer its clients user-friendly, self-service and ad-hoc reporting services. This also means that TravelTainment’s developer team can fully concentrate on its main business, rather than having to serve as a service desk for reporting.

TravelTainment is using Pentaho for reasons beyond it being open source-friendly. They are using it with their big data environment, which includes Apache Hadoop MapReduce, and for low-latency data access they are using Apache HBase.  For detailed data they are using Infobright as an SQL-based self-service interface. They are now planning to use Pentaho Data Integration to easily load, process, and extract data in Apache Hadoop.

“Pentaho Business Analytics fits perfectly into our open source Big Data environment. The outstanding self-service analytics and reporting capabilities help TravelTainment build out expertise and offer better reporting services to our customers.”

– Ibrahim Husseini, Director of Data Warehouse, TravelTainment

Read the press release and full case study about TravelTainments use of Pentaho at http://www.pentaho.com/customers/67/traveltainment.

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Posted by rebeccapentaho

Pentaho and DataStax

February 28, 2012

We announced a strategic partnership with DataStax today.

DataStax provides products and services for the popular Apache No-SQL database Cassandra. We are releasing our first round of Cassandra integration in our next major release and you can download it today (see below).

Our Cassandra integration includes open source data integration steps to read from, and write to Cassandra. So you can integrate Cassandra into your data architecture using Pentaho Data Integration/Kettle and avoid creating a Big Silo – all with a nice drag/drop graphical UI. Since our tools are integrated, you can  create desktop and web-based reports directly on top of Cassandra. You can also use our tools to extract and aggregate data into a datamart for interactive exploration and analysis. We are demoing these capabilities at the Strata conference in Santa Clara this week.

Links

James Dixon

This post originally appeared on James Dixon’s Blog

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Posted by James

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