Pentaho vs. Salesforce CRM Analytics

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.

Incentivized

For us it really comes down to that book management and next best contact for our advisors. When we're thinking about a book of business that may range, depending on the advisor, from 400 clients to a thousand clients, how do they really optimize their time? Who do they call next? Who do they work with to make sure not only they're keeping those clients engaged, they're not leaving the firm going to other advisors who they haven't talked to in a while who might need their attention. That's really where that CRM analytics is really proven pretty powerful for us.

Incentivized

• Integrate and synchronize with big data easily
• Import data from any sources and different databases
• Managing data in on-premise, hybrid and cloud environments.
• Compatibility and flexibility of the platform with any type of scenario and any business or industry
• Various tools in the software suite to transformation of data
• Simple interface appearance and creative UI graphics

• Interactive Dashboards, it [consists] of wide variety of charts
• Data from different sources can be easily integrated with it
• Security, it provides easy way to secure and share the information with the users
• Support actions like opening hyperlink etc
• Almost everything can be done from configuration
• Data can easily be managed from dataflow.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Implementation takes time and resources. It is a heavy lift to implement and at first, it can take a little bit of time to understand what you are looking at. But once it's implemented it's easy to get started.
• Without any BI expertise or resources available to your organization, the implementation of this is difficult. If you aren't used to BI tools and don't have an expert in house, the terminology can be difficult to understand at first.
• Their support is not on hand to help you if you encounter any issues, at least not on all the plans or the basic plans. Real-time support service is an add-on, so you'll need to be patient if you require help or pay extra money.
• More functionality for the tool is needed to compete with other heavyweights in the arena like Tableau, Qlik, and Microstrategy. Still lacks the robustness, functionality, and flexibility other competing products possess.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

For someone who don't have coding background, this could be a useful tool and fairly easy to learn and use given the good support. However, if you know other open source tools, it would be much easier to use the other tools and the knowledge is more transferable in the future.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I was not able to be in interaction much with Salesforce support team since every feature works the way it should be working. So far I have not experienced any bug or major glitches that would delay the result of my work and performance. There is also a hotline in our company for Salesforce issue but so far I have not used it.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

An implementation partner would certainly result in greater output in a more efficient amount of time. However, I have found implementation partners to be extremely expensive for the output received (at least working for a non-profit company they are frequently unaffordable). Internal implementation does help with usable output though since internal knowledge would better know the data architecture and business processes

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Tableau is the absolute top of the class when it comes to business intelligence, but it doesn't make sense for every business case. In our case, we needed a simple data visualization platform for our CRM platform and sales pipeline. Salesforce Analytics, while nowhere near as robust, did the job we needed it to do perfectly in a significantly more cost-effective manner.

Incentivized

• Pentaho has improved our overall business process.
• Pentaho has helped the Managers and Directors to analyze the numbers going up and down from time to time.
• We have a started a big project using Pentaho that is going to include all the business processes in the organization.

Incentivized

• I would say it's been positive just because as a company, anyone that has access to it can go in there and pull any company information and we're very up to date then on all of our client base. So I would say it's been a very positive impact.

Incentivized