Business Intelligence Player Pentaho Embraces Hadoop

Pentaho, which specializes in open source business intelligence (BI) applications, today announced far-reaching integration plans involving its platform and Apache Hadoop. As we've noted before, business intelligence software is on the rise, with numerous other open source players in the space, including Jaspersoft, Actuate, and others. Meanwhile, Hadoop is playing an increasing role in the "Big Data" trend, where organizations of all stripes are interested in mining large data sets. Pentaho is wise to embrace Hadoop for several reasons.

In a statment, Richard Daley, founder and CEO of Pentaho, said:

"Five years ago, few people anticipated the common need to perform analytics on tens of terabytes of data, but we've blown past that threshold. Organizations of all sizes are facing a massive influx of both structured and unstructured data. Pentaho is helping them to cost-effectively maximize the benefit they obtain from the information they collect."

Indeed, analytics involving large data sets are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and Hadoop is a proven platform for working with big data sets. From Yahoo to the New York Times, Hadoop is behind numerous types of large scale data analytics tasks, and has become an open source phenomenon.

The first deliverable in Pentaho's initiative is the enhancement of Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) to become the visual design environment for processes that include the manipulation of Apache Hadoop files and the execution of Hadoop tasks. Hadoop is, at its core, a Java software framework and PDI will function as a front-end for working with it.

Pentaho has set up a sub-site that delves further into how organizations can make use of business intelligence software in conjunction with Hadoop. There, you can watch a demonstration, and this blog post from Richard Daley is also worth reading. There, he notes that Hadoop lacks a graphic design tool, and that the fact that Pentaho's tools leverage Java will help it integrate seamlessly with Hadoop. "There are many more Hadoop-related ETL and BI features and tools to come from Pentaho," writes Daley.  "It’s gonna be a big summer."