We brought in Pentaho a few years ago as part of a bake-off of BI Tools, and while they ultimately lost to Qlik Sense, we were surprised to find a small department within our company that took the licenses we acquired for the bake-off and grew a steady but small BI platform that supported their functional customers. Since then it has gone through a few transformations and expanded to include the Hitachi Enterprise Cloud tools. Basically, our Supply Chain department is using it to interact with Suppliers to track waste, back ordered materials, and damaged goods, building a micro-cloud environment that is small and directed.
- It fills a niche that was needed before we as a company fully embraced the cloud with Azure. It was a great introduction to the cloud and there are some features I wish were more readily available with some of our Azure tools. Staying on top of your expenses is much harder without the transparency Hitachi provides.
- It allows the small team managing it to simplify cloud operations using prebuilt computing and storage templates. Very easy to monitor, manage and optimize cloud operations.
- Pre-Engineered, turnkey solutions with prebuilt services make it quick and easy to select the service needed for each app. With many different suppliers, we cater to many different connectors.
- Their ability to offer a public cloud solution that feels like a private cloud solution is a great feature, but not one that is easily understood outside of someone using the tool. I think they need more training and marketing around what they can do for cloud-native development.
- I think they are lacking a solution to play in other playgrounds easily. Many of their offerings are better than what Azure provides, so I think there is room for them to leverage Azure size with customized, personalized features.
- They really need something big to set them apart from the larger players in this space. I think of Snowflake with their amazing pricing model and the “oops!” button that undoes serious accidental deletes. Something like that would grow the user base and make it a major player.