Key Interest Drivers in Big Data Analytics

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 19:51:00 GMT

Big data is (very) big business but what’s driving the trend? After a stellar 340 percent increase over its own Q1 sales numbers, big data analytics provider Pentaho is offering up some insights.

According to Pentaho’s own data, a full 70 percent of its new customers are deploying on Hadoop, with the remaining new customers split evenly between NoSQL databases (MongoDB and Cassandra) and analytic databases (e.g. Greenplum and Veretica).

Pentaho played its hand in the big data game very well, releasing some of its technology to the open source community under the Apache License. That likely resulted in much more adoption in the broader developer community and brought the number of downloads for Pentaho’s big data technology to more than 65,000 over the last few months.

So what else is driving interest in big data analytics?

New Uses: Pentaho also saw a “growing spectrum” of companies getting involved with big data – spanning industries including digital media, mobile apps, gaming, healthcare, finance and more - and creating analytics products to understand customer behavior, lead conversion, security threat patterns and even supply chain optimization.

More Tools: One of the obstacles in big data analytics optimization has been the availability of tools which simplify complex scripting have emerged too, including Pentaho’s own visual design studio which creates MapReduce jobs without coding and provides an engine to execute them in Hadoop.

Kiva Adopts Pentaho BI Software

Michael Garrity — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 17:30:00 GMT

Non-profit microfinance platform Kiva.org has officially adopted Pentaho BI Enterprise Edition to automate its reporting and analytical capabilites.

Kiva's goal as an organization is to leverage the Internet and global network of microfinance institutions to help alleviate poverty. Since being founded in 2005, Kiva has made possible over $225 million in microlans between individual lenders and entrepreneurs around the world. This growth eventually led to a great increase in demand for its service, which meant that it needed a flexible, scalabe and cost-effective data warehouse and reporting system that could efficiently unify a variety of data sources and satisfy a wide-array of customers using that data.

Now, with the help of Pentaho, Kiva has switched from a "spread-mart" environment, where each department had different views of disparate data sources, to one that is able to validate and publicize numbers across the company.

Pentaho is one of the world's leading providers of business intelligence (BI) software.

Kiva now has the ability to empower users and has converted their employees into a small army of true knowledge workers. This is a tremendous improvement for a group running an online microfinance organization that requires rapid decision-making. Pentaho aided in this transition by providing the Kiva team with an Agile BI and real-time data flow.

In a press release this morning, Kiva said that they have seen an almost immediate return on investment (ROI) in their adoption of Pentaho's software. In replacing Excel, Kiva claim to already be seeing recompense with people outside of their IT department analyzing their own data and creating their own reports, allowing the engineering team to focus on the "heavy lifting" required by their website and spend far less (if any) time building custom reports.

Does this glowing recommendation from Kiva pique your interest in adopting Pentaho's BI software for your own company?

'Net Features : Pentaho

Key Interest Drivers in Big Data Analytics

Kiva Adopts Pentaho BI Software