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Reference Code: TA001989BI

Publication Date: September 2010

Author: Madan Sheina

Pentaho – Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition Published 09/2010

© Ovum. This Technology Audit is a licensed product and is not to be photocopied

TECHNOLOGY AUDIT

Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition

Pentaho

SUMMARY

IMPACT

Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition is a commercial open-source business intelligence (OSBI) solution that

provides end-to-end BI functionality. The modular system covers data integration, OLAP analysis, reporting,

ad hoc analysis, dashboards, and data-mining modules integrated on a common server-based platform. All of

the individual modules are based on open-source projects that Pentaho either sponsors or has acquired

outright. Benefiting from a vibrant open-source development community, Pentaho has been able to craft

together a broad and highly functional BI and data-integration suite that is starting to rival commercial BI

offerings. The company has also kept up with latest trends in cloud and SaaS deployment and is looking to

leverage emerging processing frameworks such as Hadoop for scalable big data analytics. In addition,

Pentaho is showing an innovative streak with a unique “agile” twist for enabling rapid BI development and

deployment. Pentaho BI Suite’s low price-point will be particularly attractive to companies operating in today’s

tight economy, particularly cost-conscious small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). However, Pentaho

still faces all the attendant challenges of selling open-source software to mainstream enterprise IT

departments.

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KEY FINDINGS

Strengths: Broad BI functionality covering ETL and data integration, OLAP, reporting, dashboards,

ad hoc analysis, and data mining.

Relatively low cost compared to traditional commercially licensed BI software.

Integrated BI development environment for rapid BI application design and build.

Weaknesses: Some modules do not have the range of functionality of competing products.

Does not provide strategic performance-management applications.

Lacks integrated search capabilities.

Key Facts: i Commercial open-source licensing model backed by large development community.

i Flexible deployment options: on-premise, on-demand (cloud and SaaS), embedded.

i Integration with Hadoop for large-scale analytics.

i A 100% compliant J2EE web application.

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OVUM VIEW

It used to be the case in the 1990s that CIOs would risk losing their jobs if they considered open-source

software. Today they risk being fired if they don’t. Much to the disdain perhaps of vendors of proprietary

commercial software, OSBI providers have not disappeared and they continue to survive and even thrive in

an economy that plays to the strengths of their open-source status. With more than 1,200 paying customers

for its commercial open-source offerings, Pentaho has certainly stood the test well, particularly in the face of

stiff competition from large incumbents and the emergence of other disruptive BI technologies and models

such as SaaS.

Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition is a broad yet well-integrated solution that covers most of the relevant

functionality one would expect from a business analytics solution. With added features to the Data Integration

module, a more efficient and cost-effective method for analysis has been provided. Any BI project is risky, yet

Pentaho customers benefit from a try-before-you buy-option where they can download the Enterprise Edition

and try it out for free, and there are also the Pentaho open-source projects that can be downloaded and

evaluated at no cost. However, for production deployments, Pentaho’s BI Suite Enterprise Edition offers

additional out-of-the-box functionality for department and enterprise deployments as well as professional

support and certified builds. The modular architecture of the BI Suite also enables a “start-anywhere and

expand” buying strategy where customers can start with modules such as Pentaho Data Integration or

Pentaho Reporting and add modules as needed.

As a relatively new BI company (founded in 2004) Pentaho does not carry any baggage into the BI market.

Because it has the luxury of no legacy products or an older customer base to support, it has been able to

architect its software on a modern tightly integrated Java platform that easily slots into modern ITinfrastructures. Using this platform the company continues to advance various aspects of its BI Suite, notably

analysis and data integration, and it now delivers rich functionality on a par with most other commercial

products on the market. However, one function we feel that Pentaho BI Suite would greatly benefit from,

particularly if it expects departmental deployments to blossom across the enterprise, is a robust search

capability for its BI and data-integration repository. According to Pentaho this is on the roadmap for 2011.

But there is more to the company than just replicating mainstream BI functionality as open-source software. It

is also pushing the boundaries of BI innovation. Ovum believes the company’s “Agile BI” initiative is a

significant step in speeding up BI design and deployment by bridging the technical gap that has existed

between BI developers and end users, and giving organizations a way to quickly reduce the time-to-insight

value that BI promises. Nor is the company blind to emerging technology trends. It is looking to tap emerging

processing frameworks such as Hadoop to boost its analytic scale and by offering an on-demand (SaaS)

version of its software earlier this year it has not ignored the push toward cloud computing.

Pentaho’s open-source project sponsorship is certainly its trump card. Tapping into a sizable and vibrant

open-source development community has allowed the company to deliver end-to-end BI functionality at a

fraction of the cost of most existing commercial solutions on the market. Furthermore, there are opportunities

for cloud/SaaS deployments that will enable it to target a much larger potential customer base. The open-

source development community also acts as wellspring for product innovation, evolution, and defect

resolution that Pentaho is cleverly tapping and committing to with its commercial offering.

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However, Pentaho’s open-source status is also its greatest challenge. While CIOs are now more comfortablewith implementing open-source products into their corporate IT stacks, many have done so at the

infrastructure layer (Linux, Apache, JBoss). Open-source business applications are relatively new and are still

perceived to carry some risk and uncertainty both in terms of functionality, support, and service-level

agreements from the vendor. The Pentaho Enterprise Edition and commercial open-source model addresses

much of this uncertainty with enhanced functionality, professional enterprise support, and certified builds.

Ovum feels that time will change this perception as more companies document their positive experiences.

There is also the question of Pentaho’s long-term stability because it’s hard to see this company being

acquired. However, there are no signs the company is putting itself in the shop window. It claims it grew its

business over 100% in 2009 and expects growth to be greater than 150% in 2010.

Despite the reservations, Ovum believes that Pentaho BI Suite is a competent offering that provides value onseveral counts including low-cost end-to-end BI functionality (including some advanced analytics), flexible

deployment options (out-of-the-box on-premise, cloud-based on-demand, or embedded), and good support

for business users.

Recommendations

An attractive option for any company that wants to replace or augment home-grown BI applications built

using expensive proprietary ETL applications, spreadmarts, or expensive proprietary BI applications.

The relatively low entry-level price point for Pentaho’s BI Suite EE makes it an affordable BI solution for

cost-conscious SMBs.

Attractive on-demand option for companies that do not have the IT resources for an internally run BI

project.

FUNCTIONALITY

SOLUTION OVERVIEW

Pentaho is an OSBI provider that aims to deliver an end-to-end BI platform covering query, reporting, OLAP

analysis, data integration, and data mining. Like most other OSBI providers it provides both open-source

projects and a commercial enterprise edition:

Pentaho open-source projects: freely downloadable open-source code.

Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition (EE): commercial open-source offering.

Pentaho sponsors and supports a vibrant open-source community that provides an important channel for

discussion and a testbed for innovation and new ideas. The company claims more than 30,000 active

members (some of the core contributors are Pentaho employees) and more than 50,000 active installations of

its open-source projects.

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Much of the code in the Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition comes from the various Pentaho open-sourceprojects. Apart from cost, the key differences between the Pentaho open-source projects and the Enterprise

Edition include additional “enterprise-ready” features including an enhanced OLAP viewer (Analyzer), solution

and user administration and security, team development, application diagnostics and performance monitoring,

repository management tools, technical support, software maintenance (including patch releases and

updates), and additional product documentation. In addition, Pentaho provides extensive ease-of-use

enhancements in the Enterprise Editions including certified software installers.

Pentaho BI Suite EE components

Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) 4.0 and BI Suite EE 3.6 were released in March 2010, and PDI 4.1 and BI

Suite 3.7 will be released in October. The suite comprises the following modules:

Pentaho Reporting, an environment for creating, formatting, and distributing pixel-perfect or ad hoc

reports via web or print formats. Reports can be created either directly against source systems or via a

centralized BI metadata layer.

Pentaho Analysis, an ad hoc data-analysis tool built on the Mondrian open-source project that supports

drill-through to source data using a relational OLAP (ROLAP) architecture and support for MDX, XML/A,

and OLAP4J. The module supports three OLAP viewers including a newly developed and more user-

friendly OLAP viewer called Analyzer that is aimed at non-technical business users and allows users to

explore and query data without technical help.

Pentaho Data Integration, a metadata-driven extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool based on the Kettle

open-source project that is used to integrate data from disparate data sources into data warehouses and

data marts. The module offers a variety of out-of-the-box transformations and a visual drag-and-drop

design environment.

Pentaho Dashboards, for creating customized dashboards that present integrated views of business

metrics using reports, charts, dials, maps, or other visual display techniques.

Pentaho Data Mining, a data-mining tool based on the University of Waikato Machine Learning Project

(Weka) open-source project that is used to uncover hidden patterns in data and to support predictive

analytics.

Customers can purchase the full Pentaho BI Suite or any combination of the above described individual

modules as a la carte.

All of the modules are designed to run on the shared Pentaho BI Server, which provides infrastructure

services such as metadata management, user authentication and security, BI content versioning, scheduling,

and portal integration.

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Platform support

The Pentaho Server is made up of a BI platform and libraries that deliver end-user BI capabilities on a

service-implemented architecture where the platform is built from the ground up as a set of services.

The architecture is lightweight with few function calls between a user request and a BI component execution.

It has a multilayered architecture (see Figure 1) that includes:

Solution engine, the core of the Pentaho BI Suite EE platform responsible for loading and executing

BI processes, also known as “Action Sequences” (reporting, OLAP analyses, dashboards).

Solution repository, invoked by Action Sequences to retrieve components such as query templates,

report templates, business rules, process definitions, and style sheets in XML format to execute BIprocessing tasks. The repository supports database as well as file-based implementations. The

database implementation uses the Java Hibernate framework to map objects to a relational

database and to automate SQL code generation.

Runtime engine, responsible for loading resources, executing all Action Sequences, and maintaining

an audit trail of component execution.

BI modules, invoke reporting, OLAP, data integration, scripting, data mining, workflow and other BI

functionality. New components can be added to the system and existing components integrate with

external processes such as printing, emails, and external BI tools.

API Layer, controls component execution from the front end, passing user requests to the Solution

Engine for Action Sequencing. Pentaho offers adapters for various protocols and standards including

HTTP, JMS, SOAP, Ajax, Java, and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL).

Client UI Layer, uses a web services API to invoke the BI platform from any other application. The BI

platform can also be linked to an ESB or service-oriented architecture (SOA). The BI platform serves

up the XML-based user interface, which can be customized, converted to HTML, used to create

servlets, or integrated with other technologies. The UI layer also provides support for Ajax and single

sign-on (SSO) security. The web browser clients invoke the UI layer.

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Figure 1: Pentaho Platform Architecture

Source: Pentaho O V U M

Only the core components of the platform, including the solution engine, the runtime engine, the solution

repository, and the configuration module, are loaded directly. All other components are loaded based on the

configuration specified. BI application developers can create templates, reports, BI components, and content,

and publish it to the solution repository to be made available to end users on request.

The software is coded on a modern Java architecture. A centralized BI server runs on a Java-compliant

application server such as WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss, or Tomcat (the latter two are provided by default).

It uses a relational database for the system and content repository (MySQL is shipped by default). At the front

end, Pentaho clients are 100% Java desktop clients that are used for designing and creating reports, ETL

transformations/mappings, and metadata schemas. The Pentaho User Console provides web browser-based

access to all BI content and the ability to perform ad hoc reporting, analytics, and dashboard creation.

The software runs on Windows (XP and Vista), Unix (HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris 10), Linux (SuSe, Red Hat,

and CentOS), mainframe (z/OS), and Mac OS X.

Pentaho’s software can be deployed on-premise (or managed on-premise) or offered as SaaS (Hosted On

Demand). The on-demand solutions are offered over the cloud direct from Pentaho or delivered through

business partners. SaaS deployments are implemented through OEM partners.

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Agile BI

A notable addition to version 4.0 of Pentaho Data Integration and version 3.6 of Pentaho BI Suite EE is a new

integrated development environment (IDE) that enables business users to collaborate closely with BI

developers to rapidly design and build BI applications. The company delivered this in the initial phase of its

“Agile BI” initiative, with “agile” referring to the flexibility and speed of development gained by providing a

unified environment for database and BI application developers to iteratively design, build, and test end-to-

end functionality from data integration to end-user report-generation, along with the company’s flexible and

accessible commercial open-source model.

Pentaho has provided an environment in which non-developers can be pulled into the BI design and

development process early on rather than being passive recipients of a system. The IDE for BI unifies (viaplug-ins) the Pentaho Data Integration and Reporting and Analysis modules to enable business users and IT

interact to prototype BI applications in hours rather than days or months. This provides a real-time

environment for business-users and developers with a single place in to sit down, create, run, and test BI

applications, and then evaluate the resulting reports and analysis, and if necessary tweak and refine functions

and capabilities.

On-demand option

The addition in May 2010 of Pentaho’s On-Demand BI subscription option enabled a more flexible approach

to implementing BI Suite’s modules as monthly subscriptions.

The key components of this service include on-demand evaluation, the Agile BI “72 Hour Challenge”, and theon-demand production deployments. Optional components include infrastructure management, application

management, managed backups, dedicated VPN connection, and custom SSL certificates.

Pentaho manages all of the hardware hosting, which is implemented as a flexible VMware image for rapid

provisioning and additional expansion (CPU, RAM, bandwidth, or storage). Customers retain the option to

transfer to an on-premise implementation should they decide to do so (the VMware image makes this very

simple).

SOLUTION ANALYSIS

Reporting, analysis, and advanced analytics

This is a strong part of Pentaho BI suite supported by a broad set of tools for analyzing and reporting on data.

Reporting

Pentaho provides a reporting environment for ad hoc reporting as well as statutory and management

reporting that is easy to set up and business-user friendly. Pentaho reporting can be deployed to user

desktops, embedded in other applications, or deployed enterprise-wide.

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The well-thought-out Designer component gives report authors everything they need to flexibly connect todata and design pixel-perfect reports for delivery over the Web or via email. The reports can be highly

interactive thanks to embedded HTML and JavaScript controls, and can include rich visualizations, with over

15 customizable chart types, barcodes, and sparklines supported.

Wizard-driven user prompts including cascading prompts are extensively used to streamline the report-

generation process from sourcing through to formatting and publishing. Localization capabilities allow reports

to be published in multiple languages based on a single report file source.

Analysis

Pentaho’s analysis capabilities are handled by the Mondrian-based relational OLAP (ROLAP) engine and its

Analyzer front-end that provides a highly visual drag-and-drop environment for analyzing large amounts of information held in relational databases. Mondrian is a highly capable and intuitive OLAP engine in its own

right, supporting MDX, OLAP4J, and XML/A, and can be deployed standalone or integrated with other

modules in the BI Suite. Analyzer allows non-technical business users to cross-tabulate, edit, add

calculations, and sort and visualize data in various formats. Pentaho has now added a drill-through capability

allowing users to navigate from aggregate views of data down to base detail records.

Mondrian supports an alternative OLAP viewer called JPivot that is based on JSP technology to provide

staple pivot table functionality and chart/graph visualization capabilities for relatively simple queries. More

complex requirements mean development in MDX language. Recognizing JPivot’s dated look and lack of

user friendliness, Pentaho has now recently developed a new viewer called Analyzer tool that is more user-

friendly with web-based drag-and-drop report creation, advanced sorting and filtering, and customized totals

and user-defined calculations. Unlike JPivot, Analyzer is not open source and is only available as part of a BISuite EE license or subscription.

There is a third viewer called PAT (Pentaho Analysis Tool) that was born out of the need to improve OLAP

viewing capabilities in the open-source edition of the software as a successor to JPivot. It is being developed

by the Pentaho community rather than Pentaho itself, but has the blessing and cooperation of the vendor.

The challenge for Pentaho is having to develop and juggle several OLAP viewers and their customer bases.

Analyzer looks like a challenge to PAT and we expect the company to rationalize this overlap soon to avoid

confusion among customers or in its development roadmap.

Advanced analytics

The Weka open-source project-based Pentaho Data Mining module can be deployed as an out-of-the-box

tool for analysts or as a set of embeddable Java components aimed at developers of custom applications.

The module offers a rich array of data-mining and predictive analytics capabilities covering all stages of data

mining including data pre-processing, data classification, and rule-based learning, all accessible through GUI

tools. It uses advanced statistical techniques and machine learning algorithms such as clustering,

segmentation, decision trees, support vector machines, multi-layer perceptrons, random forests, neural

networks, logistic regression, Bayes’ nets, and principal component analysis. The tool supports an extensible

range of filters to normalize, discretize, re-sample and select, combine, and transform data attributes. It also

offers numerous classifiers to help predict nominal or numeric quantities. The results can be viewed

graphically or programmatically and can be leveraged in ETL transformations or used as a data source for

further analysis.

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Pentaho says its data-mining engine can also perform text analytics because many of its core classificationalgorithms are being used for natural-language processing.

There are no out-of-the-box facilities for automated decision-making. However, it is possible to achieve this

through manual scripting and integration with BPEL and JMS.

Data mining is not the most widely used part of Pentaho BI Suite. However, Pentaho is starting to see greater

uptake among its traditional BI user base. Healthcare is a particular user of data mining, with the National

Health Service in the UK a user of Pentaho’s Data Mining solution.

Enterprise performance management (EPM)

Unlike other BI vendors Pentaho does not offer any classic financially oriented EPM applications for

consolidation, budgeting, planning, activity-based costing, or spend analytics. Its EPM capability is therefore

largely limited to the creation of general-purpose and operationally focused corporate BI dashboards that

surface key metrics sourced from data from back-end transactional business systems including ERP, CRM,

sales, and finance. Strategic management is therefore enabled, but it is not directly supported by more

sophisticated EPM applications and methodologies such as Balanced Scorecard and Six Sigma.

Nevertheless, the Pentaho Dashboard module provides web-based interfaces for easy access to key metrics.

It also provides information visualization capabilities and supports drill-down to underlying reports. Alerts and

notification functionality enables users to receive near real-time updates in case any KPI crosses a threshold.

The Dashboard Designer has been built with self-serve in mind to allow even first-time users to configure their

personal dashboards with relative ease.

KPIs can be defined in Pentaho action sequences as standalone objects that can be used as a data source.

Action sequences are stored and managed in the Pentaho solution repository. The dashboard displays also

incorporate Adobe Flash based visualizations for enriched interactive displays. Through an appropriate

configuration with Pentaho Data Integration, real-time dashboard displays can be also be enabled. Templates

are available for role-specific and query-specific dashboards, and the tool also factors in data security.

Data Integration

Like many BI providers, Pentaho understands the importance of having a strong back-end data-integration

competency courtesy of the open-source Kettle project and the Pentaho Data Integration product. While

Pentaho Data Integration does not have the breadth and depth of functionality of Informatica or IBM

Ascential, it is a highly functional ETL product for creating and managing data warehouses and data marts.

Despite its open-source status, Pentaho Data Integration is a modern metadata-driven tool that provides a

visual drag-and-drop design environment that supports a wide variety of data sources (more than 30 open-

source connectors) including SAP and more than 100 out-of-the-box transformation and mapping objects. It

also supports advanced data-warehousing capabilities such as support for slowly changing and junk

dimensions. Pentaho Data Integration also provides rudimentary data-cleansing functionality that can be

applied before the data is loaded into a data warehouse or ROLAP schema. For high-volume data-quality

applications customers can easily integrate most third-party data-quality products such as Human Inference

or Trillium as needed.

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Pentaho is directing a substantial portion of its R&D effort and dollars toward the data-integration module. Itrecently released a commercial version that includes new and enhanced functionality for department and

enterprise deployments in the areas of enterprise security, content management, team development, and

ease of use. Pentaho Data Integration 4.0 also includes the new Agile BI functionality that combines ETL,

metadata modeling, and data visualization in a single development environment. This functionality is

designed to help IT BI developers and analysts better collaborate in real time as BI applications are designed,

built, and deployed. Implemented via metadata and data-visualization plug-ins to Pentaho Data Integration,

the Agile BI functionality provides for more iteration of BI projects, which promotes participation by business

users. It shortens development so that BI applications can be deployed more quickly, and provides for faster

adaptability so that projects better meet the needs of end users.

Collaborating and Sharing

Pentaho BI Suite provides nominal support for collaborative decision-making. The Pentaho BI Server

provides some support for real-time and asynchronous collaboration and information-sharing through its

centralized permissions-based content repository. A hierarchy of access and sharing privileges can be

assigned to users, groups, or individual BI reports and other objects stored in the repository.

Collaboration is usually enabled by links to email and discussion threads for communicating BI reports. Users

can also incorporate their feedback in message fields and custom templates in reports and dashboards.

However, no specific collaboration environments have been built into the platform. Hooks into social-

networking environments are only provided at a data level, using the Pentaho Data Integration to access

unstructured data from RSS feeds and public APIs such as Twitter and Facebook. However, it is unclear how

this data is aggregated into the BI and analytic data model. Ovum believes there could be scope here for extending Pentaho Data Mining’s text-analysis capabilities.

The software does not provide any support for enabling people-to-people collaboration via expertise location

tools, but custom applications of this kind can be built using Pentaho BI Suite’s open APIs.

Vertical and Horizontal Analytical Applications

Although the functionality of Pentaho BI Suite is applicable across industry sectors, the company does not

offer pre-packaged applications or content for specific business processes or vertical industry needs. It relies

on customers, solution partners, and systems integrators to create custom BI content (data models, reports,

dashboards, and ETL routines) that is vertically focused on specific industries and business problems. In this

respect the company is in a better position than most other horizontal BI plays in that it can draw on a large

open-source community to encourage verticalized development and content.

Administration and Management

The Pentaho BI Server houses a centralized console for system and user management including the

scheduling and monitoring of both BI and data integration-processing jobs. Metadata Editor is a graphical

environment that is used to create and manage metadata models used by the BI platform. Granular security

(down to column and row levels) is supported alongside built-in auditing and system-monitoring and

optimization facilities. Administrators can fine-tune various aspects of the system including the core J2EE

container, analytic queries, and data-integration processes. Clustering, failover, and load-balancing

capabilities are dependent on the features of the web application server deployed.

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The commercial BI Suite EE module also includes an “Enterprise Console” that provides server and systemperformance-monitoring capabilities and enables remote job execution.

Scalability

Pentaho BI Suite and Pentaho Data Integration are used in a variety of high data volume environments and

scale well as data volumes grow and load windows shrink. To boost data scalability in response to rapidly

growing social media, web logs, and CRM related applications, Pentaho announced earlier this year its full

support for Hadoop for Big Data analytics by leveraging the map-and-reduce data-processing framework. The

integration between Pentaho BI Suite and Hadoop was tested by both the open-source community and

Pentaho’s commercial customers, and goes into commercial availability in October. Pentaho promises to

deliver a friendly interface for executing transforms and building map-and-reduce jobs that will make Hadoop

easier to use for analytic applications.

Analytic query performance is impacted by the ROLAP architecture, which although it allows users to explore

and query data without having to pre-compute and store it separately in cubes, tends to be slower than

multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP) engines. This means that performance relies almost entirely on the

database for query speeds but uses caching for reuse of query results and pre-computed aggregates that

help improve query performance. Aggregate tables are used for queries against large data volumes but are

more complex to use, and some knowledge and experience of aggregate table design is required. Pentaho

provides a tool, Pentaho Aggregation Designer, which simplifies the creation and maintenance of aggregate

tables. Ovum believes that organizations should selectively create aggregates based on user-query patterns

because loading aggregates in a ROLAP schema requires custom coding in the ETL tool. Other related

aspects that need to be considered are the size of the resulting aggregate table, and procedures for storing

and refreshing the data.

Interoperability

Integration in the BI Suite component is kept tight at both the presentation and metadata levels. All the

application modules are 100% Java, and share a common code base, UI metadata, and management layer.

In addition, the Agile BI IDE provides a unified BI design and development environment for ETL, metadata

modeling, and reporting and analysis functionality.

The Pentaho BI Server is a 100% J2EE web application designed to integrate with open standards and

systems. All the core modules (reporting, analysis, data integration) of the Pentaho BI Suite are designed to

be modular and embeddable in business applications and easily integrated with business processes external

to the platform thanks to a set of adapters for a wide range of technologies including web services, Java,

HTTP, JMS, SOAP, and Ajax.

This use of open standards and APIs allows software from Pentaho to be integrated with other applications

such as the Liferay open-source portal on Glassfish, the open-source application server from Sun

Microsystems for the Java EE platform. In addition, all Pentaho solutions are URL-addressable and provide a

variety of methods for incorporation in custom applications and mashups. The central controller of the BI

platform is a process-centric workflow engine where components can be easily customized and new

processes can be added. BI solutions can be easily integrated with business processes that are external to

the platform.

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Usability

The Pentaho UI is based on an intuitive Web 2.0-like interface that provides end-user capabilities to run

scheduled reports, view dashboards, perform ad hoc analytics, and more. The agile development

environment aids usability and productivity by providing a single environment for BI design and development

that allows IT, analysts, and business users to collaborate on BI applications. In addition, Pentaho takes

advantage of wizards to speed development. This includes extensive transformations in the Pentaho Data

Integration drag-and-drop development environment and imany templates that speed development of reports

and dashboards.

PRODUCT STRATEGY

Target markets

Although Pentaho bills its software as an enterprise BI solution, its typical strategy is to sell to a department in

an organization and watch deployments grow from it naturally as organizations experience success with their

Pentaho projects and achieve the cost savings that come from commercial open-source licenses. Typical BI

applications include sales analytics, CRM, product and customer analytics, and operations. This strategy

reflects the modular architecture of Pentaho’s BI platform, which allows customers to add functionality at their

own pace. Pentaho therefore typically targets mid-size to large organizations with its BI Suite EE offering.

Pentaho’s target market for its BI suite is horizontal. It is not usually focused on any particular vertical, but

there has been considerable uptake in the financial services, retail, telecoms, education, SaaS vendor, andeven government (federal and state) sectors. Pentaho sees much of its adoption in North America, which

accounts for over 50% of sales. However, its fastest growing region is EMEA where it reported strong sales in

the first half of 2010, and which now accounts for more than 35% of total bookings. The company is also

seeing significant traction in Asia-Pacific after signing up distribution, reseller, and OEM partners.

Because Pentaho aims to deliver an end-to-end BI platform it is understandable that some modules might be

more mature than others. Recently there has been significant focus on the Pentaho Data Integration module

because Pentaho believes that this is comparatively a very important part of BI.

Channels and Partnerships

Pentaho’s route to market includes direct sales to end-user organizations, sales to software vendors (OEM

agreements), and indirect sales to end-user organizations through reseller and SI partners. Although 70% of

Pentaho’s sales come from direct channels, partnerships are starting to feature strongly in its global business

strategy. Most sales in North America and Europe are direct. Pentaho is starting to ramp up sales through

numerous resellers, distributors, and ISV partners, particularly in EMEA. Over 30% of revenues come from

these channels, which are mainly targeted at industry vertical applications and emerging markets such as

China. Pentaho has more than 125 OEM partners worldwide. These embedded accounts (OEM agreements

with ISVs and cloud/SaaS BI offerings) are becoming increasingly important.

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Pentaho is also forging closer relationships with global systems integrators. It has more than 100 SI partners,with Accenture recently joining its SI partner program.

Pentaho has formal technology partnerships with HP, Red Hat, Sun, and others, as well as data-warehousing

providers including Teradata, Netezza, Vertica, Aster Data, Infobright, and Ingres. Because Pentaho pursues

a commercial open-source model, it also partners closely with an open-source development community of

tens of thousands of developers.

Competitive stance

Pentaho competes against three main groups: traditional BI platform plays (IBM, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft),

BI pure-plays (QlikTech and MicroStrategy), and OSBI rivals (JasperSoft and Actuate BIRT). The company

claims it wins more than its fair share of deals against these competitors. Cost is usually a trump card for

Pentaho, though its low price point (10%-20% of competitor license costs) has in some competitive deals

forced commercial rivals to lower the cost of their published pricing substantially, effectively making loss-

leader deals.

On the OSBI front JasperSoft has emerged as Pentaho’s rival when customers are looking for just a reporting

solution. Pentaho points out that JasperSoft does not sponsor a BI Suite and relies on other vendors such as

Talend for key pieces such as ETL and Pentaho for OLAP analysis when it is competing for customers that

need full BI Suite functionality. The company does bump into Actuate BIRT occasionally in reporting-oriented

implementations. From an individual component perspective Pentaho also competes against commercial and

open-source data-integration products (Informatica and Talend) and data-mining products such as R

(Revolution Analytics).

Release schedule

Pentaho plans to deliver significant product updates every six months and point-releases of individual suite

modules about three times a year. The company intends to release a mid-term product roadmap in October

2010 with major functionality for its on-premise and on-demand offerings as well major functionality for “big

data” analytics and Hadoop integration.

The main areas of advancement and development will be:

Addressing “big data” analytics where Pentaho will integrate its Data Integration module with Hadoop, an

open-source technology used to collect, store, and process large amounts of data. The integration will

provide Pentaho developers with a friendly interface for executing transforms and building map-and-

reduce jobs using the map-and-reduce computational method. The initial release in mid-October will

include data integration as well as the Reporting, Analysis, and Dashboard modules.

Continued enhancements to Pentaho’s Agile BI initiative with the capability for end users to upload their

own data into the on-premise or On-Demand Pentaho BI Suite solution via an easy-to-use data-source

wizard in Pentaho User Console will enable users to instantly visualize their data in reports, analysis

views, and dashboards by automating metadata modeling. This promises to dramatically reduce the

need for IT assistance for end users building straightforward BI applications.

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Enhancements to Analyzer to allow users to drill-down to base record detail. New features will provideone-click conditional formatting options, advanced calculations, format expressions, and localization

support.

Visual report context where end users will be able to format reports conditionally using Excel 2007-like

functions and features to create visualizations that identify outliers or spot trends.

Drill links that make it easier to create drill links on chart objects in reports to filter data or transfer to

another report or chart.

Dashboard usability will be enhanced with the incorporation of drag-and-drop elements into dashboard

operations and fully customizable template layouts.

IMPLEMENTATION

Pentaho has more than 1,200 Enterprise Edition customers globally and over 25,000 active deployments

overall.

Implementation options

Pentaho’s BI Suite EE software is sold in two ways: as an annual software license (on-premise or managed

on-premise) or as a monthly on-demand subscription (on-demand). Customers can buy either the entire BI

Suite or pick modules a la carte. Managed offerings are also provided through the vendor’s SI and reseller

partners. SaaS multi-tenant deployments can be implemented through OEM partners.

The annual software license is priced on a banded per-CPU schedule with no user limits, per-admin, per-

user, or per-site charges. Pentaho does not have any platform-specific up-charges or “power unit” prices. The

monthly on-demand subscription model provides customers with dedicated hardware and software resources

and can include infrastructure and software management and professional services as needed. The type of

implementation can be highly tailored based on infrastructure resources (CPU, memory, storage, and

bandwidth) that customers need.

Implementation length

Pentaho says a full BI Suite prototype application can be deployed in three days as part of its “72 Hour BIChallenge”. However, this is only available with its On-Demand subscription plan, which assumes that end

users do not require technical support. Otherwise, depending on deployment size (departmental or

enterprise-wide), the number of modules being installed, and level of customization, Pentaho sees typical

deployment times for production rollout of its software ranging from three to 10 days for getting a basic pilot

up and running, one to two months for a 30-user departmental application, and two to five months for a large

500-user enterprise-wide deployment.

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Implementation skills

Pentaho estimates that the resources required would typically include one technical representative from

Pentaho and at least one business user and a BI analyst from the client side. Organizations looking to deploy

Pentaho should evaluate their skills for basic dimensional modeling and ETL, OLAP, and dashboard

development. For departmental-level deployment, additional resource requirements would include an IT

administrator with knowledge of organizational security policies and some understanding of higher

dimensional modeling and BI application development.

Support services

Pentaho’s BI Suite Enterprise Edition offers services including professional support, software maintenance,

product expertise with consultative support, remote assistance packages, web-based and on-site training,

professional documentation, and access to Pentaho’s knowledge base.

Technical support is provided via two options: Platinum or Gold. The Platinum option is a 24/7 support

program for unlimited incidents with a response time of one hour for critical incidents. The Gold support option

also offers support for unlimited incidents with a response time of four hours for critical incidents.

Maintenance is automatically included in all product subscriptions. Support is also on hand by tapping into the

shared knowledge from the Pentaho open-source community.

Pentaho provides a series of on-site and online training courses ranging from basic overviews to an extensive

five-day BI Suite “Bootcamp” and specialized training such as “Agile BI for Business Analysts” and “Architects

Bootcamp”.

Pricing options

Pricing is flexible and banded according to the number of processors. An average deployment costs between

$35,000 and $50,000 per year for the Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition. Customers also have the option of

deploying individual product modules such as Pentaho Data Integration or Pentaho Reporting.

Deployment Example 1: Swissport International Ltd is a provider of ground-handling, fueling, and

maintenance for aircraft, with operations at over 180 airports in 40 countries. The company needed answers

to “expected traffic during holidays” and “seasonal staffing requirements for airport X and Y”. The problem

was that the information required was siloed across disparate business systems (ERP, MPC, and web-based

applications). Pentaho BI Suite was selected as a BI analysis and reporting standard to pull together the

necessary data to answer these questions. The system’s friendly UI means it has been rolled out to high-level

business users including the company’s top 100 senior executives to review and analyze operational flight

and cargo data as well as more strategic financial metrics and reports. A notable benefit was the reduced cost

of implementation.

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Deployment Example 2: The Swiss Colony is an established European online home-goods retailer thatneeded to understand the effectiveness of its online marketing activities. The company previously cobbled a

pseudo-BI analysis and reporting system/data-mart system based on Microsoft Excel and SQL Server that

was increasingly proving to be efficient and relied on cumbersome hand-coded and maintained back-end ETL

scripts to load data. To address this problem the company chose to implement Pentaho over commercial (and

more expensive) solutions such as Informatica and even the freely bundled Microsoft SQL Integration

Services. The company uses Pentaho BI Suite to integrate clickstream data and web analytics, focusing on

metrics like keyword optimization and ad spend. Doing so enabled the company to get a much deeper and

timely insight into website traffic, keyword performance, and revenue attrition rates.

Deployment Example 2: The Swiss Colony is an established European online home-goods retailer thatneeded to understand the effectiveness of its online marketing activities. The company previously cobbled a

pseudo-BI analysis and reporting system/data-mart system based on Microsoft Excel and SQL Server that

was increasingly proving to be efficient and relied on cumbersome hand-coded and maintained back-end ETL

scripts to load data. To address this problem the company chose to implement Pentaho over commercial (and

more expensive) solutions such as Informatica and even the freely bundled Microsoft SQL Integration

Services. The company uses Pentaho BI Suite to integrate clickstream data and web analytics, focusing on

metrics like keyword optimization and ad spend. Doing so enabled the company to get a much deeper and

timely insight into website traffic, keyword performance, and revenue attrition rates.

Deployment Example 3: Specsavers is a leading high-street optical retailer in the UK and Ireland with 200

stores. The company faced the challenge of producing meaningful metrics and reports about various

operational aspects of its business operations and providing anticipatory insights about its market andcompetitors. Because it was already comfortable with open-source technology (it had an SAL-Server-based

data warehouse), the company turned to Pentaho BI Suite primarily for its end-to-end coverage (particularly

the data-integration tools), high scalability, and its relatively low price point compared to traditional proprietary

BI solutions. The company says it is also benefiting from having a single consistent view of the state of the

business that allows key decision-makers at both line-of-business and executive levels to analyze information

by multiple business dimensions, comparing product lines, stores, regions, and time periods across a wide

range of operational and strategic metrics.

Deployment Example 3: Specsavers is a leading high-street optical retailer in the UK and Ireland with 200

stores. The company faced the challenge of producing meaningful metrics and reports about various

operational aspects of its business operations and providing anticipatory insights about its market andcompetitors. Because it was already comfortable with open-source technology (it had an SAL-Server-based

data warehouse), the company turned to Pentaho BI Suite primarily for its end-to-end coverage (particularly

the data-integration tools), high scalability, and its relatively low price point compared to traditional proprietary

BI solutions. The company says it is also benefiting from having a single consistent view of the state of the

business that allows key decision-makers at both line-of-business and executive levels to analyze information

by multiple business dimensions, comparing product lines, stores, regions, and time periods across a wide

range of operational and strategic metrics.

Table 1: Contact Details

Pentaho Corp

Global headquarters

Citadel International, Suite 340

Orlando

FL 32822

USA

Tel: +1 407 812 6736

Fax: +1 407 517 4575

www.pentaho.com

Pentaho

European headquarters

Lästmakargatan 3

111 44 Stockholm

Sweden

Tel: +46 (0) 852503428

Source: Pentaho O V U M


© Ovum. This Technology Audit is a licensed product and is not to be photocopied e 17

Headquarters

Shirethorn House,

37/43 Prospect Street,

Kingston upon Hull,

HU2 8PX, UK

Tel: +44 (0)1482 586149

Fax: +44 (0)1482 323577

Australian Sales Office

Level 46, Citigroup Building,

2 Park Street, Sydney,

NSW, 2000,

Australia

Tel: + 61 (02) 8705 6960

Fax: + 61 (02) 8705 6961

End-user Sales Office (USA)

245 Fifth Avenue,

4th Floor, New York,

NY 10016,

USA

Tel: +1 212 652 5302

Fax: +1 212 202 4684

Important Notice

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to-date and correct to the best of our

knowledge at the time of preparation. The data

and information comes from a variety of

sources outside our direct control, therefore

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