Pentaho 6 Blends Virtual and Physical Data for Business Intelligence
Pentaho is set to debut its new Pentaho 6 Enterprise 6 and community editions, providing users with new business intelligence capabilities. Pentaho formally announced the Penthao 6 release on September 30, though general availability is not scheduled until October 14.
The new release is the second update from Pentaho since the company was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) in February. The Pentaho 5.4 update, released in June, provided new capabilities such as support for Amazon's Elastic Map Reduce service.
Ben Hopkins, senior product marketing manager at Pentaho, explained that in the new 6.0 release, the Pentaho Server has undergone substantial updates to security, monitoring and lifecycle management components.
In the modern IT environment, organizations use a mix of virtual and physical data sources. As part of Pentaho 6, the company has what it refers to as the “big blend,” which mixes and matches physical and virtual attributes.
Hopkins noted that data orchestration is a core part of Pentaho 6.0, which now adds the ability to be scheduled and monitored by third-party Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) monitoring tools.
Pentaho is also making the big blend easier by focusing on the end-to-end workflow that a user follows. That workflow begins when the user first connects to the data, where Pentaho 6 now includes new interfaces for big data source configuration, with the goal of making connecting to big data sources even more straightforward. After the data sources are connected, that data needs to be blended and then put together in a model for use in reporting.
Hopkins said Pentaho allows users to start analysis immediately after blend execution and to have that model dynamically updated each time the blend is run. From a data output perspective, virtual data sets can also be exposed to third-party tools for execution of predictive algorithms, or orchestration of machine-to-machine data flows.
Another key area of innovation in Penatho 6 is with data lineage, which helps an organization trace and identify where data comes from. The data lineage information can be consumed by third-party metadata management tools using the REST API and through any metadata management tool enabled by Meta Integration’s model bridge offering. The data lineage feature also provides multiple measures of security to protect the information.
“Pentaho provides encrypted steps that can be used to extract the information via the REST API and transmit in an encrypted form,” Hopkins said. “Also, the lineage information can be stored in an encrypted file system or data store for protection from future modification.”
With the Pentaho Enterprise Edition 6.0 out on October 14, the next update isn't likely to come until next year.
“Pentaho normally introduces two to three releases a year,” Hopkins said. “We’d expect 2016 to be similar with an update in the first part of the year.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Apps Today and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist
Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.
