Continuing to deliver on the future of analytics, Pentaho Corporation today announced the general availability of version 5.1 of its business analytics and data integration platform, offering companies enhanced capabilities to scale up their big data operations. Building upon the foundation of enterprise big data blueprints, the Pentaho 5.1 platform enables companies large or small to take full advantage of big data without having to endure a lengthy, specialized process that often proves a barrier to entry to big data.

Big data technologies have made it easy and cost-effective for businesses to store high data volumes, but companies often do not initially consider the end game of analytics. This disconnect requires specialized IT skills later in the data ‘production line,’ resulting in increased cost and delays in making information available to data scientists and decision-makers. Pentaho 5.1 helps to bridge the data-to-analytics divide by offering code-free analytics directly on MongoDB, accelerating and simplifying the data preparation process for data scientists and offering full support for YARN.

Analytics on MongoDB with zero coding
The release enables MongoDB data collections to be analyzed directly ‘at the source,’ eliminating hand-coding and having to prepare data in a staging area. This gives modern, big data-driven companies greater capacity to make reliable insights faster, using fewer specialist skills.

“Traditional RDBMS analytics can get very complicated and quite frankly, ugly, when working with semi or unstructured data,” said Chris Palm, Lead Software Architecture Engineer at MultiPlan. “The Pentaho 5.1 platform is meeting market needs, allowing users to directly analyze data in MongoDB. We have seen more accurate results with new analyses and are no longer constrained by having to pull only part of our data. We can now look across a more full set of data and govern our system of record to gain greater insights.”

MongoDB World delegates will be the first to see the Pentaho 5.1 platform when Bo Borland, VP Field Technical Sales, presents an overview of the new MongoDB Analytics capabilities on Tuesday, June 24 at 4:00pm. The featured demo blends real-time Twitter feeds with NASDAQ stock quotes into a single MongoDB view for understanding the impact of Twitter sentiment on stock valuations. 

Operationalizing R and Weka for data scientists 
Pentaho 5.1 further removes barriers to large-scale analytics with the availability of its new Data Science Pack, announced earlier this month. The Pack equips data analysts and scientists with everything they need to rapidly build a ‘360 degree customer view’ that blends different data sources, like social and MongoDB, and enable advanced analytics like churn prediction and customer sentiment.  Further, the Pack allows data scientists to focus on high value, advanced and predictive analytics by dramatically reducing the time it takes to prepare data for analysis.

Full YARN Support
YARN integration, announced earlier this year by Pentaho Labs, is now enterprise-ready in Pentaho 5.1. Pentaho developers familiar with Pentaho Data Integration can easily exploit the full computational power of Hadoop, without having to write complex MapReduce code.  With YARN, Pentaho Data Integration jobs can make elastic use of Hadoop resources, expanding and contracting as data volumes and processing requirements change.  YARN’s advanced resource management capabilities support mixed Pentaho workload scenarios where continuous data transformation and analysis is required.

According to Christopher Dziekan, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Pentaho, “The new capabilities in Pentaho 5.1 support our ongoing strategy to make the hardest aspects of big data analytics faster, easier and more accessible to all. With the launch of 5.1, Pentaho continues to power big data analytics at scale, responding not only to the demands of the big data-driven enterprise but also provides companies big and small a more level playing field so emerging companies without large, specialist development teams can also enter the big data arena.”