Pentaho has launched Pentaho Business Analytics 5.0. The new release represents a redesign of the company's data integration and analytics platform, and provides analytics for big data-driven businesses supported by more than 250 new features and improvements. Pentaho Business Analytics 5.0 is the culmination of years of work on development and also incorporates the result of usability studies on the Pentaho Business Analytics interface. “This is really an evolution of our platform as a whole. It is a significant release with a simplified analytics experience,” Donna Prlich, Pentaho senior director of product and solution marketing, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
In terms of usability, the Pentaho User Console has been redesigned to improve the users’ experience, so they can easily browse files, create new content, quickly access recent documents, and mark “favorites.” In addition, a new administrator perspective is now integrated into the Pentaho User Console for a single seamless experience, allowing administrators to easily configure and manage security levels, licensing and servers, resulting in improved efficiency and time to implementation. Executives and managers can also view top-line metrics through Pentaho’s new custom-designed dashboards, delivered directly to desktops or mobile devices.
Another key aspect of the new release revolves around helping customers to better deal with big data, says Prlich. Addressing this requirement, there are two important new capabilities. One is in the area of “blending” data types to allow users to immediately report, visualize and explore for greater insights. According to the company, blending big data “at the source” maintains the appropriate level of data governance and security necessary for accurate and reliable analysis. Pentaho 5.0 enables analysts to create cleansed, architected blends directly from diverse big data sources with the ease of use and real time access necessary in agile analytics environments. While typical end-user blending requires the staging of data, resulting in data sets that are often out of date, with Pentaho 5.0’s big data integration capabilities, the company contends, analysts can blend data in near real-time and immediately analyze the results.
And finally, adds Prlich, the new release delivers new enterprise-level capabilities within Pentaho including integrations and certifications for popular big data stores. Integrations include Splunk, Amazon Redshift, Cloudera Impala; and certifications include MongoDB, Cassandra, DataStax, Cloudera, Intel, Hortonworks and MapR
“From analytics to data integration, we have really invested across the board in the platform,” notes Prlich.
For complete information about the new release, go to www.pentaho.com/5.0.