Looking for the perfect match

February 28, 2013

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I’m at the O’Reilly Strata Big Data Conference in Santa Clara, CA this week where there’s lots of buzz about the value and reality of big data. It’s a fun time to be part of a hot new market in technology. But, of course, a hot new market brings a new set of challenges.

After talking to several attendees, I would not be surprised if someone took out an advertisement in the San Francisco Guardian that reads:

SEEKING BDT (Big Data Talent)

“Middle-aged attractive company seeks hot-to-trot data geek for mutually enjoyable discrete relationship, mostly involving analytics. Must enjoy long discussions about wild statistical models, short walks to the break room and large quantities of caffeine.”

The feedback from the presentations and attendees at Strata mimics the results from a Big Data survey that Pentaho released last week showing there is a lack of current skills to address new big data technologies such as Hadoop among existing staff and more generally on the market. This is good news for folks looking for jobs in Big Data and a good indication for others who want to learn new skills.

The market has created the perfect storm – the combination of hot new technology mixed with a myriad of very complex systems plus highly complicated statistical models and calculations. This storm is preventing the typical IT generalist or BI expert from applying.  More experienced data scientists who can spin models on their head with a twist of a mouse are in high demand. The need to garner value quickly from Big Data means there is little time to look for the “perfect match.”

It seems like new companies and technologies pop up almost every week, each with the promise of business benefits, but with the added cost of high complexity.  Shouldn’t things get easier with new technologies?

Pentaho’s Visual MapReduce is a prime example of things getting easier.  Getting data out of Hadoop quickly can be a challenge.  However, with Visual MapReduce any IT professional could pull the right information from a Hadoop cluster, improve the performance of a MapReduce job and make results available in the optimal format for business users.

New technologies might need new talent, but in the case of Pentaho Visual MapReduce, new technologies might only need new tools to help address them.

Looks like Pentaho is the perfect match.

Chuck Yarbrough
Technical Solutions Marketing

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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

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