News

Pentaho Platform Visualizes Big Data at All Stages

• By David Ramel
• October 18, 2016

Pentaho will soon launch a new platform that provides Big Data visualization during all stages of the analytics pipeline, including early-on data preparation.

The company, which has long touted the strategy of combining data integration with business intelligence because they're "better together," will next month launch Pentaho Business Analytics 7.0, which features new capabilities for the wildly popular Apache Spark data processing engine, better Apache Hadoop security and other enhancements.

However, it's the early data visualization capability from within even the early stages of the Big Data analytics pipeline that the Hitachi Group company is emphasizing. Most solutions, the company said, require that such visualization be done in latter stages of the pipeline, and with the use of separate tools.

"Pentaho 7.0 enables data engineers and analysts to easily prepare and visualize data -- at any step in the data preparation process -- without moving between separate data integration and visualization tools," the company said yesterday in announcing the new platform.

Company exec Donna Prlich expounded more on that capability in a blog post, noting that the traditional idea of moving static data linearly through three distinct phases, while an accurate depiction, isn't efficient.

"Instead, data runs through pipelines," she said, "and being able to analyze and visualize data anywhere in the pipeline means organizations can now use resources more efficiently and drive better business insights faster."

This capability means developers tasked with extract, transform and load (ETL) duties and the data preparation people can conduct spot checks on in-flight data, performing instant analytics or generating charts, graphs and visualizations to share with the business types. Furthermore, data sources can be published early on for business use providing a quick, less iterative approach to analytics.

"Our Pentaho deployment helped to improve efficiencies throughout the organization so that we're providing a better overall experience to our customers," the company quoted customer Meir Kornfield at Sears Holdings Corp. as saying. "The ability to spot check and visualize our data throughout its lifecycle allows for a much more informative and streamlined data-driven decision making process to create more reliability, while reducing costs."

The company also quoted from a TDWI Research paper (which Pentaho co-sponsored), "Improving Data Preparation for Business Analytics."

"It's easy for any business unit in an organization to spin up an environment to run analytics," reads the report authored by TDWI's David Stodder. "Yet, your insights are only as good as your data. Pentaho provides an analytics platform that incorporates data preparation and integration for analytics processes, enabling users to visualize and analyze data at different steps within the data pipelines they create."

Pentaho said the new platform will be generally available in November.