Pentaho provides a broad suite of analytics tools which not only address BI, but also support predictive analytics and data integration. The open source pedigree of Pentaho means a free community edition is available for those who would rather not spend any money, but in reality most organizations will go for the commercial version for support, training and all the other things that make business applications work.
The visual analytics are on a par with most competing products with many types of charts and graphs. These can be assembled into dashboards with functionality supporting drilling and rich navigation. The less glamorous reporting needs of the organization are also well catered for with web-based reporting for business users and a powerful report designer for enterprise needs. It does what most businesses want without a great deal of fuss, and provides a pragmatic approach to meeting business information needs.
Management and administration of the BI environment is very well catered for, with extensive tools for security, content permissions, versioning, locking, backup and recovery, data integration tools and performance monitoring and auditing. Finally the data integration capabilities are similarly fit for purpose with drag and drop tools, big data compatibility and access to most data sources.
In common with just a few other BI platforms (Spotfire for example), Pentaho supports predictive analytics – both creation and execution (models can be imported using PMML). R and Weka are both accommodated and resulting predictive models can be integrated into the overall environment.
Pentaho is broad enough to meet most needs, and is best summarized as a ‘good all-rounder’ – something that will be attractive to business managers who simply want to get a job done.