Pentaho 5.4 Gets New Spark

Sean Michael

Updated · Jun 10, 2015

In February of this year, Hitachi Data Systems announced its intention to acquire privately-held business intelligence vendor Pentaho. The deal officially closed yesterday, and Pentaho is now a Hitachi Data Systems company.

As proof Pentaho isn’t sitting idle under new ownership, it is rolling out its new Pentaho 5.4 business analytics platform.

“We are delighted to officially welcome Pentaho to the Hitachi family,” Kevin Eggleston, senior vice president of Social Innovation at HDS, said in a statement. “Their data analytics, visualization and integration platform is an integral part of our advanced analytics foundation, which is the engine that powers Hitachi Social Innovation solutions.”

Among the key new capabilities in Pentaho 5.4 is support for Amazon’s Elastic Map Reduce (EMR), a Big Data processing service that leverages the open source Hadoop framework. According to Amazon, EMR securely and reliably handles Big Data use cases, including log analysis, Web indexing, data warehousing, machine learning, financial analysis and scientific simulation.

With the new EMR support in Pentaho 5.4, organizations can orchestrate their business intelligence workloads on Amazon’s cloud.

The SAP HANA in-memory database is now also a supported platform to handle data sets with high levels of performance.

From a user perspective, the Pentaho data integration (PDI) component has been updated to make it easier for users to handle data. Going a step further, PDI now integrates with the Apache Spark project. Apache Spark provides a large scale data processing capability for complex data streaming.

Pentaho 5.4 also includes new APIs that are intended to help make it easier for organizations to integrate analytics into business processes and applications.

“We continue to deliver on our vision to help organizations get value out of any data in any environment with Pentaho 5.4,” Christopher Dziekan, chief product officer, Pentaho, said in a statement. “Our open and adaptable approach means customers choose the best technology for their businesses today without the worry of being locked-out in the future.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Apps Today and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

Sean Michael
Sean Michael

Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.

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