Pentaho Setting Trends among the Business

Intelligence Analytics Tools in 2016

Business Intelligence and Analytics solutions are slowly becoming an integral part and are

almost indispensable for multiple aspects of enterprises across industries & domains; Sales,

Marketing, Production, Supply-Chain, Retail, HR, CRM and many more through the prudent

insights they provide through data analysis within the enterprise. Focused on the enterprise goals,

today BI and Analytics are transforming into a service by themselves; contributing to facilitate

judicious decisions yielding competitive advantage to businesses of all kinds.

The Business Intelligence propelled enterprises draw inspiration from reputable researches like

the Gartner offering knowledge of the modern ways of implementing technology and deriving

solutions for enterprises to integrate modern methodologies in their processes.

Enterprises today are adopting various practices for Business Intelligence to offer relevant and

purposeful solutions with engaging user experiences to their business community.

Enterprise Strategies derived from BI

Self Service Models to extract data

Integrating Wearables, Devices, Smartphones and IoT into the BI ecosystem

Big Data and Hadoop

Analytics Governance

Data Assets Monetization

Natural Language Processing

Data Science & Advanced Analytics

Business Intelligence and Analytics are set to provide a firm grounding for planning future

offerings as also increasing efficiency in workflows and hence reducing costs with increased and

quicker RoIs for businesses. It would be really unreasonable and unfair to rank the elite BI tools

available today or compare them, as they need to be weighed by the pros and cons in the context

of the nature of the business itself, rather than generalizing.

A few of them like Pentaho, Microsoft BI, Tableau and Qlik really catch the eye and we do end

up having a discussion of sorts.

Pentaho, besides being an established trend in Business Intelligence Analytics, offers the best as

promised and takes the cake for OEM, embedding, IoT Analytics and other needs of the future.

Named as a Rising Visionary by Gartner, Pentaho offers promising solutions across domains and

industries with its competent features. This article compiles a few important features where

Pentaho stands an edge apart from its other contemporaries and wins hands down

Pentaho Scores Higher and Better with a Competent Feature List for Business Intelligence

Enterprises with requirements of a comprehensive solution to adapt to diverse data requirements

like the traditional SQL databases, NoSQL databases, Big Data & Hadoop or unstructured data

fed into the system by contemporary touch points like social media and IoT find their answers

with Pentaho.

Pentaho emerges as a comprehensive platform including metadata, data cleansing, data analytics

and predictive analytics all together. Pentaho data integration capabilities too deserve a mention.

Being a Java enabled platform, Pentaho is flexible, pluggable and very easy to embed and it

provides a rich end to end BI solution to enterprises. Enterprises are known to have used their

own systems complemented by Pentaho capabilities of reporting engine, Data Visualization

layer, Security layer and workflows to come up with all in one solution.

Pentaho’s current focus and vision for the future, targets big data and the emerging IoT market,

favoring specialized and advanced implementations. Data source connectivity, self-contained

ETL &data storage, embedded advanced analytics & embedded analytic content are among

Pentaho’s top critical capabilities scores. The platform’s capabilities span from data integration

with PDI to advanced analytics with Weka and R integration.

Pentaho reaches out data sources across systems seamlessly from on-premise to the Cloud. The

open architecture allows it to offer practical solutions for embedding Cloud based solutions

within the existing enterprise architectures with the benefits of flexible and scalable multi-tenant

deployment capabilities with unbeatable security features.

When it comes to facilitating Self-Service, Pentaho remains a tool of choice for most with its

capabilities of self-service creation in browser interface, embeddable into third party applications

and interactive reporting tools for users to build their own reports.

Other popular platforms for Business Intelligence and Analytics like Microsoft BI, Tableau and

Qlik fail to match up the flexibility offered by Pentaho, especially when it comes to Data

Integration and building customized plugins and self-service facilities.

Purchasing & Pricing

License costs for Pentaho are much more conducive as it is an open-source BI platform. While

Microsoft frequently changes its pricing and packaging keeping users in a tizzy, Tableau loses

out in the battle of cost as compared to the other low priced entrants. Tableau’s reluctance to

offer conducive enterprise pricing model affects its popularity too. Qlik on the other hand turns

out to be really expensive for larger deployments and loses out as compared to Pentaho.

Customer Support & Sales Experience

Pentaho is known for a responsive and timely customer support and also offers to give

workarounds to users whenever required. Survey references rank Microsoft lower on the scale

for customer support and Qlik even with its recently introduced Proactive Support has a long

way to go.

The Learning Curve & Resource Availability

Tableau and Qlik both have a stiff learning curve to understand their true powers. Pentaho

requires higher level of IT skills and support as compared to other Business Intelligence

Analytics tools and expects SQL querying skills when creating Pentaho reports. But Pentaho

Enterprise Edition is conducive for building reports and dashboards without IT skills. Microsoft,

on the other hand requires mature SQL programming support. The challenges in availability of

skilled resources in the market for Pentaho are outweighed by the advantages offered by it.

In a Nutshell

Pentaho remains a favorite and is a newsmaker on many websites and magazines offering

Business Intelligence keys for the success of modern enterprises.

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