What Was Announced?

Pentaho announced Version 7.0, which provides a unified platform for data integration and visual analysis. It also announced a visual design environment for orchestrating Spark applications and support for Kerberos and Cloudera Sentry to improve big data security.

Why Is This important?

Traditionally, IT prepares data in one platform so it can be exported to another for analysis. This procedure renders IT data-blind. Pentaho 7.0 enables IT developers to visualize data at any point in the data lifecycle. Once IT can visualize data, it can correct problems before passing data to business users. With IT able to perform data quality checks earlier in the data lifecycle businesses can cut down on the time necessary to acquire good data and ultimately insights.

The new visual design environment for Spark makes it easier for non-coders to develop Spark-based applications, while Pentaho 7 now works with Kerberos and Cloudera Sentry.

What is the Impact?

This announcement gives Pentaho a leg up on data integration and data preparation competitors, few of whom have an integrated visual analysis tools. Most vendors are focused on delivering self-service data integration functionality (i.e., data preparation tools), not visualization. Pentaho has taken the opposite tack, focusing on visualization before data preparation, where it needs to improve.

The data integration space is evolving quickly, and we expect some vendors to offer a converged platform before long. Most have shied away from visualization so as not to compete with business intelligence (BI) partners. However, a growing number of BI vendors embed data preparation functions, enabling business users to toggle between data modeling and visualization functions. So, we expect data integration to do likewise.

 Recommendations For Customers

Pentaho customers who have purchased Pentaho’s separate data integration and visualization tools should upgrade to Pentaho 7.0. The new version will simplify processes, save time, and improve the quality. Pricing will remain equivalent. Pentaho provides migration utilities to facilitate the upgrade.