Pentaho BI 4 Adds Interactive Reporting, Visualization 
Pentaho Corp. has updated its open source BI with interactive reporting, data discovery and access to more data sources. IDN explores Pentaho BI 4 Enterprise Edition’s latest capabilities for architects, devs, admins and end users with Pentaho CEO Richard Daley.
Pentaho Corp. has updated its open source BI, adding interactive reporting, data discovery and access to more data sources. Pentaho BI 4 Enterprise Edition also sports a new interactive UI designed to give business users the ability to access, analyze and create customized reports from more sources, and more easily.
IDN explores Pentaho BI 4 Enterprise Edition’s latest capabilities for architects, devs, admins and end users with Pentaho CEO Richard Daley.
“With new tools like interactive reporting, richer interactive visualizations, and its new user interface, Pentaho BI 4 is driving user-driven, self-service BI, thanks to a rich set of underlying data integration and federation features,” Daley told IDN.
Download a copy of Pentaho BI 4 here
About 18 months ago, we and others in the industry, as well as analysts like Gartner, started to see a spike in registrations from IT and I-related job titles to line-of-business titles,” Daley said. “For Pentaho, we knew we could leverage that trend with our low-cost model, driven by open source and because we don’t require an expensive data warehouse or data mart.
The next step to tap into this growing LOB adoption trend in BI would be to beef-up Pentaho’s self-service capability for business users, he added. Enter Pentaho BI4, which delivers interactive, web-based report designer leverages Pentaho’s established suite of data analysis, data integration, and data mining capabilities.
A quick snapshot of Pentaho BI 4’s capabilities allow non-technical business users to:
- Dynamically interact with saved reports by applying sorting, filtering, groupings and summary totals on the fly
- Easily create highly-formatted, interactive reports without training or dependence on IT
- Incorporate interactive reports into Pentaho dashboards
Pentaho 4 features allow power-users and business analysts to:
- Enhance data discovery with new multi-chart visualization capabilities
- Drill up and down through data hierarchies and link visualizations to related content
- Improve interactivity with dashboards via addition of dashboard-level filters and the ability to link to additional content
- Access more complex data sources leveraging Pentaho’s best-in-class semantic metadata layer that allows users to interactively report and analyze data
Daley points to these key areas:
Interactive reporting – People can point to different data sources, capture that data with simple drag and drop, and then build and publish highly customized and sophisticated reports. “We’ve put a lot of work into these reporting capabilities to extend the richness of the data users can access, but also to avoid the need to go between basic reporting and more complicated desktop tools,” Daley said.
Extended visualization, analysis for data discovery – To go beyond simple reports, and explore data for trends and patterns, Pentaho 4 added support for multi-dimensional charting. “This lets a user display more info on a screen so they slice and dice their data and results, and more easily spot trends and patterns,” Daley said.
Self-service BI – Simple-to-use wizards let users point to individual data sources or even combine data sets they want to merge together. This feature works across multiple data types, including SQL, Excel, ERP, or SaaS-based data, such as Salesforce.com.
All this focus on self-service for business users also has a strong impact on IT and data admins.
How Pentaho BI 4 Connects the Dots Between LOB Self-Service and IT Architecture
Pentaho 4’s features create a blend of new capabilities that push self-service BI to a new level, and still provide easy access to under-the-hood capabilities for IT and data specialists, as needed, Daley said.
IT and BI admins and developers can:
- Access data from a wider range of Big Data stores including Hadoop and NoSQL
- Leverage new, tighter integration with high performance data marts and data warehouses (EMC Greenplum and Ingres Vectorwise)
- Deploy “data integration as a service” projects, which tie together data from multiple sources on-the-fly
- Make integrated data sets available as a virtualized federated data stream via web services, without a data mart or warehouse
- Easily set up report bursting using a drag-and-drop workflow design tool
- Provide mass distribution of personalized content to information consumers
“Our step-by-step wizards and points-and-click features will let business users do much of this for themselves, without help from a specialized data expert or someone in IT,” Daley. But even when a business user needs special support from IT or data specialist, Pentaho 4’s strong data integration comes right in the package. “For special projects, we don’t expect an end user to be doing ETL scripting or anything like that. So, IT can use our tools to do integration or data federation, without having to leave [the Pentaho environment] and use outside tools and scripts.”
For example, Pentaho 4 lets IT support reports using multiple data sources with a reporting engine that calls the data integration server and pulls the data in real time, piping it straight through for reporting, Daley said.
