Updates on the Pentaho World

Warm-up

To begin, a brief explanation is in order regarding the events that have been heating up the market and the community of companies, users, and developers of decision support solutions, who avoid wasting vast resources on legacy software licenses and instead build their own custom, independent solutions. Free from ties to license vendors, server providers, or extremely expensive and endless consulting, courses, or training.

Many ambitious projects today, all over the world, are only considered viable because of the facilities offered by the Pentaho product, an open-source, free suite (a set of integrated software tools) that covers all stages of Business Analytics and/or Business Intelligence solutions, end to end. Pentaho has been boosted, so to speak, by CTools, a set of plugins created by a Portuguese company, Webdetails. In 2013, it was acquired by Pentaho, the company that maintains the product under the same name, which features an Enterprise version—which is paid and even more complete than the free Community version. Both versions now include several of the CTools as an integral part, along with the Pentaho Marketplace, which is responsible for installing and managing plugins.

In 2015, Pentaho was acquired by one of the largest groups in the world, Hitachi, a global leader in industries, infrastructure, and technology, which focuses, among other areas, on the IoT (Internet of Things) market. They manage, among other enterprises, nuclear power plants, subways, railways, and have a highly considerable range of sensors. All of these sensors generate data, which needs to be analyzed in a timely manner to make sense and help in decision-making, applicable in practically all spheres of society. This is where the Pentaho suite comes in.

Pentaho Day 2017 Brazil - Curitiba/PR

Pentaho Day 2017 - BrasilAnd speaking of Pentaho, it is worth highlighting, even with a bit of a delay, that Pentaho Day 2017 Brazil - Curitiba/PR was fantastic, as always. There was so much learning and so many connections established that several projects since then have been executed here at e-Setorial and consumed our time, but we cannot fail to praise yet another initiative of the Pentaho Brazil community, which helps professionals and companies of different industries and sizes. As an example, our projects this year were so varied, ranging from the analysis of Distance Education data, the Data Enrichment of Individuals and Corporations in Brazil, the analysis of Hospital data for Health Insurance Plans, to a complete risk management system for Hydroelectric Power Plants and Dams. All developed using Pentaho in its free version, achieving excellent results.

The largest Pentaho community event in the world featured over 400 participants and included Lectures, Case Studies, and Mini-courses taught by some of the greatest references on the subject, which took place at Universidade Positivo, in Curitiba/PR, Brazil, on May 11 and 12.

The main highlight was Matt Casters' presentation on his fantastic Web Spoon, which is Pentaho Data Integration running entirely on the web, making the development and maintenance of solutions even easier.

Much of the material produced and presented at the event is available on the event website, including the mini-course offered by Eduardo Carvalho, from e-Setorial, titled "Design Patterns para Tuning Pentaho com Ctools".

Fanboy Moment

Eduardo Alves de Carvalho

Senior BI Analyst at e-Setorial

"It's not every day that we meet so many professionals we admire all at once. I couldn't miss the chance to record this get-together with the American Matt Casters, on the left, creator of Pentaho Data Integration, and the Portuguese Pedro Alves, in the center, the Creator of CTools, a friend and my instructor on several occasions since 2012. And this happening in my hometown, Curitiba. Pentaho Day Brasil 2017"


Exquisite Organization

The organization of the event was flawless. We leave our thanks to our friend Marcio Junior Vieira, from Ambiente Livre, responsible for yet another edition of the event.

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Hitachi Vantara

Hitachi VantaraOn September 18, 2017, Hitachi announced the formation of Hitachi Vantara, a company whose goal is to help organizations thrive in today's uncertain and turbulent times and prepare for the future. This new company unifies the mission and operations of Pentaho, Hitachi Data Systems, and Hitachi Insight Group into a single business, Hitachi Vantara. Together, they give business leaders an edge in finding and using the value in their data, innovating intelligently, and achieving outcomes that matter for businesses and society.

Introducing Vantara: a combination of IT, operational technology (OT), and domain expertise. With Pentaho data integration and analytics software, Vantara gives organizations the power to efficiently capture and use data from the "edge," where data is moved fluidly by sensors and devices outside of day-to-day business operations, and combine this sensor data with more traditional enterprise data resources to provide a high level of context and intelligent predictions that lead to real business results.

What those involved are saying

Donna Prlich

CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER

Pentaho data integration and analytics will continue to evolve, and Hitachi Vantara will invest to stay ahead of future developments in big data, IoT, and machine learning. We know what our customers need, and with the power and resources of Hitachi, we can get them there even faster.

Pedro Alves

SVP Community / Product Designer for Pentaho at Hitachi Vantara

Não há planos de mudar a estratégia de código aberto ou parar de fornecer uma edição CE para a nossa comunidade! Essa mudança pode acontecer no futuro? Oh, absolutamente sim! Assim como poderia ter mudado no passado. E quando poderia mudar? Quando ele deixa de fazer sentido; quando deixa de ser mutuamente benefício. E naquele dia, serei o primeiro a sugerir uma mudança em nosso modelo. Se a opensource nos trouxe aqui em primeiro lugar - mudaremos realmente isso agora que as coisas estão se aquecendo? Nós somos loucos, não estúpidos;)

In summary, a new company with a much larger structure has been created, called Hitachi Vantara, which will continue to work with the Pentaho product in its Enterprise (paid) and Community (free) versions.

Pentaho 8.0

Hitachi VantaraThe community is buzzing, and at Pentaho's global event, PentahoWorld 2017, which took place last week between October 25 and 27 in Orlando, Florida.

Among all the fantastic cases presented, another bombshell news emerged. Pentaho version 8 was announced, scheduled for next month.

  • Platform and Scalability
    • Worker nodes
    • New theme
  • Data Integration
    • Streaming support!
    • Run configurations for jobs
    • Filters in Data Explorer
    • New Open / Save experience
  • Big Data Vendemos Inteligência Empresarial
    • AEL improvements
    • File formats for Big Data - Avro and Parquet
    • Security in Big Data - Support for Knox
    • VFS improvements for Hadoop Clusters
  • Others
    • Ops Mart for Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server
    • Platform password security improvements
    • Mavenization PDI
    • Documentation changes at help.pentaho.com
    • Feature removal:
      • Analyzer in MongoDB
      • Mobile plug-in (disabled in 7.1)

Conclusion

Hitachi Vantara With investments that only a large corporation can make, the product has everything to spread even further and gain ground from the big players. The development team does not stop, unlike competitors who only think about selling licenses to use their tools. More and more, Pentaho brings security, ease of development and maintenance, and best of all, with features that surprise even the most demanding users. It is true that JavaScript and MDX knowledge are still required to implement more specific dashboards, however, simple yet powerful applications can be created in minutes, without writing a single line of code. This is the way forward.

And let Pentaho 8.0 come!

Useful Links

And where did the forums, wikis, and communities go? Below we have separated some important links that will give you more confidence: 

# Tips
1 Ctools
2 CCC Playground - Ctools charts documentation
3 Some demonstration dashboards
4 Pentaho Community website
5 Brazil user group
6 Global community forum
7 Pedro Alves Blog
8 Development, training, and specialized consulting in Pentaho

References