Getting to know the Pentaho Development Company

The Pentaho Development Company is a company that offers Pentaho business analytics. It is a suite of open source BI or business intelligence products that provide integration of data, reporting, OLAP services, data mining, dash boarding as well as ETL capabilities. It was founded in 2004 and headquartered in Orlando, Florida. The Pentaho suite has two offerings, the enterprise and community edition. The enterprise edition has extra features that are not found in the community edition. The enterprise edition is acquired through a yearly subscription and has extra support services.

The main offering of the company is often enhanced by add-on products, typically in the form of plug-ins, from the company itself as well as the broader community of enthusiasts and users. The Pentaho Business Analytics is made on top of various underlying open source projects available under different licenses that affect product aspects like distribution and embedding rights. The licenses help Pentaho achieve the goal of offering long-lived and reliable software products via a collaborative open source software development.

The Pentaho Business Intelligence or BI Suite is the world’s most popular suite for reporting, analysis, data mining, dashboard, and workflow and ETL capabilities. Companies distributing Pentaho software or derivative works of the software may be required to release their product as open source and must consult with a legal counsel to very compliance with various licenses. Pentaho provides commercial license for distributors that make this requirement not necessary. Business has grown since the last few decades, which result in a lot of heterogeneous systems generating big data at different levels as well as in an organizational level. This created a pressing need to consolidate all data on one common platform and perform in-depth analysis which help organizations make the right decisions. In itself, this stream is distinctly named as Business Intelligence.

Pentaho is about to launch the version 6 of the Data Integration and Business Analytics Platform. This culminates the journey that embraced all of the key trends in business intelligence and predictive analytics featured over the last few years. One of the areas that Pentaho leads is Big Data integration. Big Data is more than just pertaining to scale, it is about variety, velocity and volume of alternative data sources and types compared to the stable structured nature of a traditional business intelligence data sources. Moreover, the company is among the leaders in offering the capability to tame disparate data sources and bring them to play in a similar managed environment.

The vision of governed data delivery lies at the heart of what separates an enterprise business intelligence platform from an assembly or group of databases. It’s only when data is governed that the results from the analytics could be trusted. The commercial success and response of the customers demonstrate the fact that Pentaho is increasingly seen as a superior alternative to inflexible proprietary BI solutions that could never respond to the evolving market requirements. It is advancing with amazing speed, and the momentum in the market would be fueled further by the present economic conditions that make business intelligence more relevant than ever before.

Dhrumit Shukla is Business Development Manager with TatvaSoft - a custom software development company. He writes about Technology Trends, experience working with B2B and B2C clients.