Welcome Pentaho’s new secret weapon, Eddie White

February 27, 2012

We are very excited to have a new secret weapon onboard with Eddie White joining Pentaho as Executive Vice President of Business Development. Eddie is responsible for developing strategic relationships with big data vendors and commercializing Pentaho Business Analytics for major cloud/SaaS hardware and software vendors.

Eddie has more than 20 years of experience helping businesses meet and exceed their sales revenue and growth targets through, business development, strategic alliances partnerships, and acquisitions. Career highlights include:

  • Directed global sales and business development as CRO, SVP of Global Sales and Business Development for leading Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) startup Sentilla Inc.;
  • Led strategic business development and partnership activities for two flagship storage and infrastructure management business units with combined annual revenue of over $1bn at Computer Associates (CA) Inc., where he was VP of business and corporate development;
  • Delivered OEM storage solutions for the client on schedule and budget as business development director at Adaptec Inc.;
  • Managed storage business unit with P&L responsibility for a $60m p.a. at Eurologic Ltd.
  • Graduated with a diploma in business studies and first class honors from University College in Cork, Ireland and received a bachelors of business studies with honors from Dublin City University.

As you can see from his career highlights, Eddie is a proven technology industry business development professional who has built partnerships and OEM relationships with companies of all sizes. He’s exactly what Pentaho needs to keep us on the forefront of the big data revolution.

Welcome Eddie!

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Posted by rebeccapentaho

Pentaho’s first mover status in the big data space

February 8, 2012

I am very excited to share the news the Pentaho is cited as the only  ‘Strong Performer’ in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Hadoop Solutions, Q1 2012 (February 2012).

The best way to summarize Pentaho’s position in the market is straight from the report by James G. Kobielus, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research:

“Pentaho is a strong performer with an impressive Hadoop data integration tool. Among data integration vendors that have added Hadoop functionality to their products over the past year, it has the richest functionality and the most extensive integration with open source Apache Hadoop.”

We believe that the inclusion of the Pentaho Kettle data integration product in the first Forrester Wave: Enterprise Hadoop Solutions report is a strong testimonial to Pentaho’s first mover status in this space. The scores awarded to Pentaho are a testimonial to the fact that Pentaho is helping companies operationalize Big Data by addressing critical pain points associated with Hadoop Data Integration and easy analysis of Big Data.

I encourage you to access the full report and see why Pentaho was named a strong performer and how we stack up against other vendors.

Richard

About the report
The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Hadoop Solutions, Q1 2012 included 13 enterprise Hadoop solution providers in its assessment for its Enterprise Hadoop Solutions report. The firm examined past research and user needs assessment and conducted vendor and expert interviews in order to formulate a comprehensive set of 15 evaluation criteria, which Forrester grouped into the three high level buckets of current offering, strategy and market presence.

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Posted by Richard Daley

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

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Posted by quentingallivan

Pentaho Expands Big Data Support with EMC Greenplum UAP

December 8, 2011

Today 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):

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Posted by quentingallivan

Building the Future of Analytics

December 1, 2011

It 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

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Posted by quentingallivan

Why Pentaho Analyzer was ‘on the money’ at Strata

February 9, 2011

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Last week, Pentaho was a sponsor at The Strata Conference in San Francisco, California. Over the two-day conference our booth was constantly packed with attendees. As I chatted with these eager visitors, I was pleased to hear comments such as: “My boss has asked me to look into Pentaho,” and “We currently have product X and we are looking into solutions that are easy to use and don’t charge an arm and a leg for it.” As I was demoing the Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition, one thing was clear … the line between business users and technical users is fading fast!

Everyone wants access to data, but not everyone has it. Technical users, the ETL and BI developers, spend all their time on working with data, integrating, cleansing, standardizing, and analyzing it, but the business users need their data in a different way. Data gives these business users power.

The days of traditional BI when IT was building standard reports and pushing it out to business users are over. Canned reports are too slow to arrive, too limited on the information they provide, and often are too far out from what the business needed in the first place.

Business users want the power and flexibility to work with their data, and to compare and contrast anything to everything. But they want an intuitive and easy way to work with their data, similar to the tools they are most familiar with such as Excel pivot tables. This became all very clear as I was demoing the Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition. The reaction of people to Pentaho Analyzer was right on the money. Pentaho Analyzer has the same look and feel as Excel spreadsheets, with an easy drag and drop capability to pull business data (customers, sales, orders, payments, time, region, territory, etc.) up to the canvas and slice and dice it to the heart’s desire. “Why not Excel?” one attendee asked me. The answer is simple….Because you can see the changes that your colleagues or IT staff make to data, immediately, without having to cross-check, guess, or ask about. Your Excel data is as good as it once was!

Pentaho Analyzer’s easy to use and intuitive ad hoc analysis capabilities, with hyperlinks for drill through to detailed transaction data behind the scenes, along with its strong charting capabilities and the flexibility to turn your final analysis results into Excel, PDF or any other popular format, topped it all off. I was pleased to see a lot of nods as I was demoing the software, a confirmation to Pentaho’s focus, strategy, and roadmap.

For additional highlights from the Strata conference read blog by Ian Fyfe, Thoughts on last week’s Strata Conference.

For a free 30 day evaluation of the Pentaho BI Suite (including Pentaho Analyzer), please go to http://www.pentaho.com/download/

Farnaz Erfan
Product Marketing Manager
Pentaho Corporation

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Posted by Farnaz Erfan

Thoughts on last week’s Strata big data conference

February 8, 2011

Last week I attended the O’Reilly’s Strata Conference, in Santa Clara, California where Pentaho was an exhibitor. I gave a 5-minute lightning talk during the preceding Big Data Camp “un-conference” on the topic, The importance of the hybrid data model for Hadoop driven analytics, focusing on the importance of combining big data analytic results with the data elements already in firm’s existing systems to give business units the answers to questions that were previously not possible or economic to answer (something that of course Pentaho now makes possible). I also sat down for an interview with Mac Slocum, Online Managing Editor at O’Reilly, you can see the video below where we discuss  what kinds of businesses can benefit from big data technologies such as Hadoop, and what is the tipping point for adopting big data technologies.


The high quality of attendees and activity at this sell-out conference I think further confirms that although development work on solutions for big data has been happening for a few years, this area is undergoing a quantum leap in adoption at businesses both large and small. Simply put this technology allows them to glean “information” from the enormous quantities of often unstructured or semi-structured data that in the past was simply not possible, or was eye-wateringly expensive to achieve using conventional relational database technologies.

I found that the level of “Big Data” understanding maturity among attendees was quite varied. Questions spanned the entire spectrum with a few people asking things like “What is Hadoop?” to many along the lines of “Exactly how does Pentaho integrate with Hadoop’s Map-Reduce Framework, HDFS, and Hive?” Some attendees were clearly still in the discovery and learning phase, but many were confidently moving forward with the idea of leveraging big data, and were looking for solutions that make it easier to work with big data technologies such as Hadoop to deliver new information and insights to their businesses. In fact, it is clear that the emergence of a new type of database professional: the data scientist is rapidly becoming mainstream. This person combines the skills of software programmer, statistician and storyteller/artist to extract the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data.

Ian Fyfe
Chief Technology Evangelist
Pentaho Corporation

Here are some in-action photos of our booth at the Strata Conference

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Posted by ianfyfe

Sex
 & 
Sizzle 
– 
not
 without
 plumbing

November 16, 2010

What sells BI software? Sex and Sizzle! What makes BI projects successful? All of the data work done before any grids or graphs are ever produced. It’s the side of the business most BI vendors don’t talk about as they’d rather just woo and wow people with flash charts and glossy dashboards. Not that there is anything wrong with that – who doesn’t like great looking output? But, if the backend plumbing is either too complicated or non-existent, then it doesn’t matter how sexy this stuff is.

Today Pentaho announced the Pentaho Enterprise Data Services Suite to help make the “plumbing” as easy and efficient as possible. We’ve enabled people to iteratively get from raw data–from virtually any source–all the way through to metadata and onto visualization in less than an hour. We’ve enabled a new set of users to accomplish this by taking away many of the complexities.

In about 80% of the use cases we encounter, our customers want to quickly create and perform analytics on the fly, do this in an iterative approach, and when satisfied put their projects into production. You shouldn’t need a Ph.D in Data Warehousing to accomplish this, nevertheless many tools require extensive knowledge of DW methodologies and practices. It is fine to demand this knowledge with larger Enterprise DWs (EDW) but why make everyone pay the price – both in terms of software cost and experience/training required.

Now it would be one thing to provide data integration with RDBMSs, another thing to integrate with ROLAP, and yet another to integrate with Big Data like Hadoop, but how nice would it be to have a single Data Integration and Business Intelligence platform to work for all of these? Almost as nice as the Florida Gators winning a national championship but we won’t have to worry about that in 2010…had to digress for a moment.

A big part of our product release today centers around Pentaho for Hadoop integration including the GA for Pentaho Data Integration and BI Suite for Hadoop. Big Data and the whole ”data explosion” trend is just starting, so if you aren’t there today, give it time and know that Pentaho is already positioned to help in these use cases.

Pentaho allows you to start down an easy path with Agile BI and then scale up to EDW when and if necessary with enterprise data services. Our engineering team and community have spent significant time and effort to bring these services to market, and today is the official release. Please take a few minutes to read up on the new Pentaho Enterprise Data Services Suite and attend the launch webcast. Or, go ahead and download the Pentaho Enterprise Data Services Suite and start making easier, faster, better decisions.

Richard

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Posted by Richard Daley

Data, Data, Data

October 12, 2010

It’s everywhere and expanding exponentially every day. But it might as well be a pile of %#$& unless you can turn all of that data into information. And do so in a timely, efficient and cost-effective manner.  The old-school vendors don’t operate in a timely (everything is slow), efficient (everything is over-engineered, over-analyzed, over-staffed, etc) or cost-effective mode (the bloated supertanker needs feeding and the customer gets to pay for those inefficiencies), so that means new technologies and business models will drive innovation which ultimately serves the customers and communities.

Back to Data, Data, Data – Enter open source technologies like Hadoop and Pentaho BI/DI to drive next gen big data analytics to the market. Hadoop and Pentaho have both been around about 5 years, are both driven by very active communities, and have both been experiencing explosive growth over the last 18 months. Our community members are the ones who came up with the original integration points for the two techs, not because it was a fun, science project thing to do but because they had real business pains they were trying to solve. This all started in 2009 – we started development in 09, we launched our beta program in June 2010 (had to cap enrollment in the beta program at 60), launched a Pentaho for Hadoop roadshow (which was oversubscribed) and are now announcing the official release of Pentaho Data Integration and BI Suite for Hadoop.

I’m in NYC today at Hadoop World and we’re making four announcements:

  1. Pentaho for Hadoop – our Pentaho BI Suite and Pentaho Data Integration are now both integrated with Hadoop
  2. Partnership with Amazon Web Services – Pentaho for Hadoop now supports Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) and S3
  3. Partnership with Cloudera – Pentaho for Hadoop will support certified versions of Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop (CDH)
  4. Partnership with Impetus – a major Solutions Provider (over 1,000 employees) with a dedicated Large Data Analytics practice.

Consider this as phase I of building out the ecosystem.

We’re all about making Hadoop easy and accessible. Now you can take on those mountains of data and turn them into value. Download Pentaho for Hadoop.

Richard

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Posted by Richard Daley

Six reasons why Pentaho’s support of Apache Hadoop is great news for ‘big data’

May 19, 2010

Earlier today Pentaho announced support for Apache Hadoop – read about it here.

There are many reasons we are doing this:

  1. Hadoop lacks graphical design tools – Pentaho provides plug-able design tools.
  2. Hadoop is Java -  Pentaho’s technologies are Java.
  3. Hadoop needs embedded ETL – Pentaho Data Integration is easy to embed.
  4. Pentaho’s open source model enables us to provide technology with great price/performance.
  5. Hadoop lacks visualization tools – Pentaho has those
  6. Pentaho provides a full suite of ETL, Reporting, Dashboards, Slice ‘n’ Dice Analysis, and Predictive Analytics/Machine Learning

The thing is, taking all of these in combination, Pentaho is the only technology that satisfies all of these points.

You can see a few of the upcoming integration points in the demo video (above). The ones shown in the video are only a few of the many integration points we are going to deliver.

Most recently I’ve been working on integrating the Pentaho suite with the Hive database. This enables desktop and web-based reporting, integration with the Pentaho BI platform components, and integration with Pentaho Data Integration. Between these use cases, hundreds of different components and transformation steps can be combined in thousands of different ways with Hive data. I had to make some modifications to the Hive JDBC driver and we’ll be working with the Hive community to get these changes contributed. These changes are the minimal changes required to get some of the Pentaho technologies working with Hive. Currently the changes are in a local branch of the Hive codebase. More specifically they are a ‘Short-term Rapid-Iteration Minimal Patch’ fork – a SHRIMP Fork.

Technically, I think the most interesting Hive-related feature so far is the ability to call an ETL process within a SQL statement (as a Hive UDF). This enables all kinds of complex processing and data manipulation within a Hive SQL statement.

There are many more Hadoop-related ETL and BI features and tools to come from Pentaho.  It’s gonna be a big summer.

James Dixon
Chief Geek
Pentaho Corporation

Learn more - watch the demo


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