Pentaho Corporation, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), has announced Pentaho BI Suite Version 3, aimed at making it cost effective for businesses to deploy easy-to-use, robust BI capabilities to users throughout the organization. Pentaho BI Suite Version 3 allows business users to easily create interactive dashboards-including Adobe Flash-based visualizations-without training. Also, based on existing customer successes and growing customer demand, Pentaho is introducing a Cloud Computing Edition, packaged for deployment on the Amazon EC2 Cloud, providing companies with another way to drive down the cost of bringing BI into their organizations.
Version 3 of the BI Suite has new features and offerings for a variety of different user groups. For business users, Pentaho has added an easy-to-use, web-based graphical dashboard designer requiring no training. This can be used to easily define personalized, interactive dashboards, including Adobe Flash-based visualizations, using theme-based templates. The dashboards can incorporate reports, analysis views and other Pentaho content, along with filter controls that synchronize dashboard content based on user selections for time periods, product lines, regions, and more.
For IT users, the Cloud Computing Edition is packaged for deployment in Cloud computing environments and will be delivered as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for deployment on Amazon EC2, so costs scale with usage, avoiding the onerous named-user, perpetual licensing structures of traditional BI packages. Cloud BI brings many of the benefits of software as a service (SaaS) to custom BI applications, including lower up-front costs and simplified infrastructure management.
For Community Contributors, Version 3 includes a new plug-in framework that allows community members, OEMs and system integrators to easily drop in extensions and other contributions. The plug-in architecture handles integration points, including menus and toolbars, registering new content types, repository integration and content browsing, and physical deployment within web and application servers.
Lance Walter, vice president of marketing for Pentaho, tells 5 Minute Briefing that "as with prior versions, we expect Version 3 on the BI Suite to be adopted by customers in a wide variety of ways. Some customers utilize the entire suite including data integration, reporting, dashboards, analysis, and data mining. However, since the suite is modular and open, other customers deploy specific modules that meet a specific need they have in their BI stack." For more information about Pentaho, go here.