Pentaho the best BI integrator
Updated November 04, 2014
Pentaho the best BI integrator
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
3.2
Modules Used
- PDI
- Mondrian/Schema Workbench
- BI Server
Overall Satisfaction with Pentaho
Our product intended to analyse Media and Communications data and provide decision making capabilities to our end users. Whereas we built the workflow management, transactional capabilities, Pentaho provided the BI layer for our product. Analysts were our end users. Everything from data ingestion to decision making was the scope of our product. We read data across disparate data sources/formats and using our business expertise provided decision making capability.
- Data Integration. Pentaho wins hands down. You can read huge data using a Hadoop process, do your encirchment, load it to a Netezza database afterwards, finally input the data to your WEKA model to predict which Customer will churn or what offer should be made to the customer so that he/she stays put.
- BI Server. If you want to schedule a data read operation of your clickstream data, to finally burst out recommendations of next best actions to end users, Pentaho's BI Server performs this integration seamlessly.
- Mondrian. This layer provides Cube based Hierarchical data modeling on the front end and at the back end converts this OLAP structure to a ROLAP, SQL based model. Hence any relational database becomes a ROLAP engine seamlessly.
- Data Visualization. Provide richer library of data visualization capabilities. Ultimately the dashboards are the end result of all the hard work done at the back office. Yes, Pentaho has a lower TCO compared to other Products but richer data visualization capabilities would make it a winner! Pentaho has overcome this limitation by allowing external charting engines to be integrated with their product suite, but more needs to be done to strengthen core Pentaho Data Visualizaiton capabilities. Alternatively the external charting engine capabilities need to be documented and evangalized.
- Alternative to Mondrian. In our case we needed to analyse data for a million subscribers over key performance areas like Churns, Activations etc. In these scenarios semi additive measures needed to be calculated and presented in a report across days to years grains of time. In such scenarios the Mondrian based ROLAP capability did not scale up to our expectation. Pentaho needs to address such issues and fast.
- In the world of R/SAS/SPSS its hard to find use cases where WEKA was used in Production environments to solve a business problem. We would have needed some hand holding to replace our R/SPSS code to WEKA and help us build newer alogorithms on this platform ground up.
We evaluated Panorama, Cognos, MicroSrategy, Jasper Reports, Talend and homegrown solutions. Though each were awesome in their own right, none of them provided a end to end integration like we wanted. Pentaho did the job for us and more. Knowing that Pentaho was built by a team who were industry veterans made us feel comfortable that the basics were always a given and that we could always reach out to them for more. Plus Pentaho's responsiveness in providing a hands on expert to train us was a huge plus.
Using Pentaho
10 - Managers, System Analysts and Business Analysts. We provide financial analytics hence the users are somewhat tech savvy, know how to use the system and get meaningful information from it to complete their day to day activities. Some users use our product for strategic planning purposes such as budgeting and marketing spend.
5 - Java is a must have. Somebody who is proficient with object oriented programming concepts, understands APIs.
ETL Developer. Must have hands on experience coding ETL using SQL and/or proprietary tools.
Report Developer. Must have experience with building reports with Excel, Business Objects et al.
Solutions Engineer. Must understand how Pentaho fits with the overall Product offering. Should have the customer in mind at all times during product integration.
ETL Developer. Must have hands on experience coding ETL using SQL and/or proprietary tools.
Report Developer. Must have experience with building reports with Excel, Business Objects et al.
Solutions Engineer. Must understand how Pentaho fits with the overall Product offering. Should have the customer in mind at all times during product integration.
- As a replacement for our costly and technically disparate ETL and data visualization solution.
- As a integration software for our transactional systems with our BI systems.
- As a workflow management, business process specific application system.
- As a dashboard/reporting solution.
- As a end to end data integrator. Right from data ingestion to pretty pictures that provide business value and decision making capability.
- As a workflow management solution.
Evaluating Pentaho and Competitors
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
Integration. That Pentaho had ETL, reporting, scheduling, workflow management included in one software plus being Java based it could be easily integrated with our existing software stack was the most important factor in choosing Pentaho.
I would place high marks on the visualization layer. If I cannot use one aspect of a Product suite it becomes difficult to evangelize the product within an organisation. Or I would set internal expectations that though the Product offers various modules, our evaluation should restrict itself to 2-3 core ideas and evaluate accordingly.
Pentaho Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Yes - We first chose the reporting solution as a module to integrate. Via API calls this module was integrated with our existing Product for transactional reporting purposes. Next phase of our implementation was centered around integrating the ETL solution into our product as a single point of data ingestion mechanism. Once the data was brought in using Schema Workbench we built the logical layer to help publish dashboards/reports via the Pentaho BI Server.
- Technical expertise. Finding the right people who understood Java and BI was a tough ask. So we decided to keep the teams separate and let a Solutions Engineer/Architect provide direction for the integration.
- The team had prior experience in using stable proprietary products where documentation was plenty and hence any issue could be solved easily by tapping into the knowledge base around. Customer support interactions were infrequent. With Pentaho it was vice versa, where we depended more on Customer support than on community knowledge.
Pentaho Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Support understands my problem Support cares about my success | Escalation required Slow Initial Response |
Yes - For any production related issues where a hotfix is the only way to go.
For any configuration related issues where best practices are known but are not working as expected.
For any configuration related issues where best practices are known but are not working as expected.
Yes - Some bugs were resolved whereas some were slated in a much later release.
Using Pentaho
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Technical support not required Feel confident using | Difficult to use Slow to learn Lots to learn |
- End to end data ingestion to data visualization is easiest to do.
- Dashboard/report creation, distribution is easy too.
- Workflow integration is best used in Pentaho. You can schedule an invoice to be loaded as soon as it arrives in your ftp server, you can apply business rules, load it to your database, refresh the data warehouse with this latest invoice and finally burst an email with telling all users to go and see the report. All this can be achieved in Pentaho's Workflow integration tool.
- You HAVE to know Java to use Pentaho to the best of its capability. For pure BI enabled users like myself, it was a steep learning curve.
- Trying to match Customers data visualization expectations was tough, Our customers had already used Tableau and/or Microstrategy/Cognos/Business Objects, hence it was always a tough ask to match/better what they had already seen and experienced.
Yes, but I don't use it