Hitachi's Acquisition of Pentaho Makes it a Big Data Analytics Player

We've been watching the Big Data space pick up momentum as 2015 begins, and now Hitachi Data Systems Corporation has announced its intent to acquire Pentaho in what is being billed as "the largest private Big Data acquisition transaction to date." Hitachi claims that the acquisition will accelerate enterprise adoption of Big Data technologies and solutions through "easier, faster deployment, leading to faster ROI."

We've been fans of Pentaho for a long time here at OStatic, and closely followed the fact that the organization open sourced its key business intelligence tools three years ago.  This acquisiton provides more evidence of how commercially focused companies are finding sensible ways to leverage open source platforms.

Among open source tools for business, Business Intelligence (BI) platforms have been rapidly increasing in popularity. These applications are used to better understand historical, current and future aspects of business operations. The tools typically offer ways to mine database- and spreadsheet-centric data, and produce graphical, table-based and other types of analytics regarding business operations. Among the big players in this category, Pentaho is a leader.

Big data capabilities available under Pentaho's open source platform include the ability to input, output, manipulate and report on data using many Hadoop and NoSQL stores, with Cassandra, Hadoop HDFS, Hadoop MapReduce, Hadapt, HBase, Hive, HPCC Systems and MongoDB among them.

"Data remains an untapped resource for many organizations and businesses -- with the realization of the value of that data remaining a challenge," said Kevin Eggleston, senior vice president, Social Innovation and Global Industries, Hitachi Data Systems. "The combination of Hitachi's broad industry expertise, advanced information technologies, and now Pentaho software and the talented team of experts, will enable us to give customers a more complete solution to manage their data -- allowing them to leverage the power of big data and Internet of Things in a quicker and simpler way."

"We are pleased to join the Hitachi Data Systems family and truly believe our complementary set of solutions will accelerate the adoption of big data deployments and Internet of Things applications," said Quentin Gallivan, chairman and chief executive officer, Pentaho. "The broad resources, expertise and global presence of Hitachi Data Systems, as well as Hitachi, Ltd., help ensure a strong foundation for Pentaho to continue to accelerate our big data analytics and data orchestration capabilities, bring new innovations to market, and expand support for current and future customers."

According to Hitachi's announcement:

"Pentaho delivers a foundational technology for big data. The fundamental promise of big data is to enable customers to capture, blend and analyze a broader array of data sources to derive new business insights. The Pentaho platform simplifies preparing and blending any data and includes a spectrum of tools that enable users to easily analyze, visualize, explore, report insights and predict outcomes. Pentaho offers a platform that is open, embeddable and extensible, which allows it to deliver data and analytics as a service to customers and partners. The platform is architected to ensure that each member of an organization's team -- from developers and data scientists to business users -- can easily translate data into competitive advantage."

 Pentaho has a blog post up about its future with Hitachi, found here. "Hitachi owns the infrastructure and Pentaho owns the data integration and analytics platform and know-how to harness the value in big data," it notes.