At the crossroads where traditional business intelligence meets big data you’ll find Pentaho, the company making inroads converting the latest tech trend into seriously useful information.
Based in Orlando, the Open Source business intelligence and analytics provider claims to offer clients user-driven, interactive visualization and data exploration functionality and could give anyone looking for technology or media jobs some serious opportunities.
What’s more anyone using the company’s tools can access all information sources, including big data and there’s the chance to use an interface with which Software as a Service (SaaS) companies to add their own visualizations.
Sounds complicated, but the ideas have substance as a $23 million Series C round will attest. Well, it’s being referred to as a Series C, but it’s actually Pentaho’s fifth round and brings its funding total to a cool $55 million. Add to that the fact the company saw a 300% increase in big data sales up to September 2012 over the same period in 2011 and you have a serious player on your hands.
Sounds Impressive, But What Does it All Mean?
The website claims ‘Pentaho tightly couples data integration with business analytics in a modern platform that brings together IT and business users to easily access, visualize and explore all data that impacts business results’.
In plain English, the company offers users a suite of Open Source Business Intelligence tools labelled Pentaho Business Analytics which comprise data integration, online analytical process (OLAP) services, reporting, data mining and extract, transform and load (ETL) capabilities.
Pentaho provides two versions of its Pentaho Business Analytics package – a community edition and an enterprise edition. The latter is purchased on a subscription basis and includes services, support and upgrades and three variants – Basic, Professional and Enterprise, while the community edition is a free, open source product.
It is this open source heritage that makes Pentaho the perfect choice for around 1000 big hitters including SpecSavers, Ideeli, Marketo and SwissPort who have chosen Pentaho’s Enterprise edition to provide their analytics.
What Does the Company Have to Say?
Following this latest funding round, which saw input from New Enterprise Associates, Index Ventures, Benchmark Capital and DAG Ventures, Pentaho is looking to push ahead and develop its stake in big data analytics.
CEO Quentin Gallivan said: “Pentaho has a proven big data strategy with over 300% increase in big data sales for the first nine months of 2012 over the same period in 2011,” he said.
“This Series C investment allows Pentaho to keep pace with fast-moving technology innovations, recruit the necessary talent to execute on our big data strategy, and to expand our leadership in big data analytics,”
Again, this is encouraging for those who are on the lookout for technology jobs and have the track record to show they can keep up with the rapid pace set by the likes of Pentaho.
Investor Harry Weller of NEA agrees with Gallivan and is looking forward to taking the business forward.
He said: ““Pentaho has carved out a massive opportunity as an analytics and intelligence layer for a wave of web-scale, open-source data solutions. With a robust platform that complements technology offerings across the big data stack, Pentaho is helping its customers realise the true potential of big data.”
And the Future?
As it moves towards further developing its big data capabilities, upgrades to Pentaho Business Analytics 4.5 include improved data visualization, which offers users the ability to actually visualize big data. The company’s interactive visual analytics include lasso filtering, zoom and attribute highlighting across all chart types.
Pentaho’s big data functions also offer distribution across Hadoop clusters and expanded NoSQL database integration including detailed reporting through Apache Cassandra, DataStax and MongoDB.
It certainly seems that Pentaho’s offer is a comprehensive one that will increasingly embrace the big data movement; however the improvements must continue for it to keep ahead of other big data analytics players such as Oracle, IBM, SASM SAP, Jedox and Jaspersoft.