Nexthink is a SaaS provider headquartered in Lausanne, that provides a digital workplace experience management software solution that combines real-time analytics, instant remediation, automation and employee feedback across endpoints and applications.
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Pentaho
Score 5.6 out of 10
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Pentaho is a suite of open source business intelligence and analytics products, now offered and supported by Hitachi Data Systems since the June 2015 acquisition.
I've been managing desktops for 20+ years and Nexthink was the missing tool out of my toolbox. Just to give some perspective, if you were building and maintaining a house, Nexthink would be comparable to switching up from a hammer and nails and to full blown using a nailgun. Nexthink is a solution accelerator and a well thought out toolset to give you the customer experience at a glance. It allows for so much more visibility just with the default set of data points the Collector (agent) gathers, which is A LOT, and grants you the ability to gather even more data with remote actions. All of this evidence cuts how the "it could possibly be this" and "maybe it's that" discussions when you're troubleshooting an issue. It may not provide the exact answer all the time, but it gives you a "compass point" on where you need to start looking to resolve the issue. Also the service monitoring, activity monitoring, and critical event thresholds really empower the teams to know when a problem is happening and they can get ahead of it before the first call even reaches the Help Desk. Nexthink is a cornerstone tool in our environment for end user experience and I'm excited to see where the go next.
Pentaho is very well suited to perform data extraction & data mining from various cloud storage & transform that data using various available data models. However, the software struggles when it comes to visualizing the extracted data in an appealing manner & can be difficult for end-users to get an understanding of data tables created using those models.
The on-premise solution can be slow at times and resource-demanding even on newer laptops. (This isn't the case with the cloud offering.)
Some useful features are only available to cloud customers.
Library pack configuration could be made easier, often these packs require some customization and it's not always clear how to get them up and running after importing.
I think the relative obscurity of the tool is a downside, not as many developers, consultants or peers you can tap into.
Lack of a solid user community held us back, looking at Power BI and Qlik, they have huge user communities that help each other out. Would have liked that here.
Smaller company means smaller sales force, and the lack of a local presence made it hard to only interact online with the account rep. Other companies have someone local who often stops by with pre-sales developers to just pitch in free of charge when they have time.
I will use Pentaho until I find a better tool with a better, easier to use report designer client. For now, Pentaho has been the most powerful reporting tool for our clients because of its ability to connect to Odoo, integrate in Odoo (reports are accessible in Odoo) and the flexibility in report design and parameter integration
The Pentaho tools are designed so you can start playing around on your own. Of course, you will need guidance at some point, but the training teams are good at guiding new users, and the online documentation is usually pretty up-to-date.
Some of the tools, such as the Pentaho Data Integration tool and the Pentaho Server, are pretty self-explanatory. The other tools maybe are not so quickly and obvious to use, but again, with some documentation and some customer support, you can find your way around them.
They were responsive to our questions when we raised issues. They gave us workarounds when required. They were quite knowledgeable when it came to issue analysis and providing fixes. They were forthright in informing us if a bug was not due for release soon.
Course Taken: DI1000 Pentaho Data Integration Fundamentals Setup A week before your class started, the instructor will start sending out class material and lab setup instructions. This is helpful so that you understand how the environment is laid out and can start reviewing the content. Ultimately it saved about a 1/2 day trying to setup with 10 other people online which was great! The Course The 3-day course was laid out like many other technical classes with 15-30 minutes instruction and 15-60 minutes of lab exercises. The instructor was very knowledgeable with the functionality from version to version and answered questions as we went along. I was amazed at some of the functionality that was available that I was not using at the time and quickly implemented changes to many existing transformations and jobs. The novice users seemed to catch on quickly and more experienced users explained how some of the functionality was used in their home environments. Towards the end there was enough time so that we were able to ask very directed questions about our own environments. Overall, I really found the class to be informative and deliver enough information to be dangerous. My skills improved and I was able to design better and efficient transformations for the HIE. Course Description: https://training.pentaho.com/instructor-led-training/pentaho-data-integration-fundamentals-di1000
Get the right people in before starting implementation. Start small and build as you go approach is time consuming and involves lot of rework. Evangalize within the organization the capabilities and limitations equally so that correct delivery expectations are set. Set expectations with the Customer that the tool cannot replace proprietary software in terms of stability/usability and that timelines could change given the new ness of the product.
Nexthink had better integration and a better user interface. 1E did not have the engagement capability which is so critical to many of the actions we complete using Nexthink. Nexthink had better trending data capabilities. 1E did not capture and hold data the way Nexthink does so all data assumes you are able to pull information from all systems at any time. with remote systems it is unlikely you will capture all systems at the same time so it makes any actions less effective. this review was performed 4 years ago so 1E may have addressed some of these limitations but Nexthink has also grown and continues to add and improve on their industry-leading capabilities.
Since the Pentaho platform offers a range of broad functionality across data preparation and advanced analytics, it also can be easily integrated to support many data sources and machine-learning frameworks. Based on that fact, we selected Pentaho to be used in our internal department. It also supports many of our BI use cases as required by company management or the business user. Last but not least, the Pentaho license is cheaper than their competitor.
SCCM proactive remediation: Automatically resolving hundreds of SCCM issues per month
Hardware: Identification of over $5m cost avoidance by seeing a lack of usage for 128GB SSDs - no need to upgrade to 256GB... coupled with OneDrive migration packs in the Nexthink library this is valuable.
