Pentaho Corporation, a commercial open source business intelligence and data integration software vendor, has announced the release of Pentaho BI Suite Version 3.5, which includes new report and dashboard design capabilities for both business and IT users, as well as technical and packaging changes to enable broad use of Pentaho for embedded business intelligence by OEMs and SaaS providers. In addition to the new software, Pentaho is also offering a new report migration service that enables the conversion of reporting from proprietary business intelligence platforms to the lower-cost Pentaho reporting tools.
The three key themes of this latest release from Pentaho are design, deploy, and migrate. For design, Pentaho BI Suite Version 3.5 includes a new Pentaho Report Designer that provides high productivity for report authors with features such as a streamlined report design wizard and an interactive preview mode that lets authors view changes in real-time. Self-service dashboard design for business users has been provided with Pentaho Dashboard Designer 3.5 which has the ability to easily create new data and chart visualizations in Pentaho's thin-client user console.
For deployment by embedding BI into third-party applications for on-premise and SaaS deployment, Pentaho is now offering Pentaho Reporting Embedded Edition. From a technical perspective, Pentaho Reporting Embedded Edition now incorporates all of the resources required by a report including query information, images, layout, and templates into a single file, simplifying deployment and maintenance.
For report migration, Pentaho is now offering the Escape program, a fixed-price, fixed-deliverable service to convert reports from traditional proprietary BI tools to commercial open source BI from Pentaho. Pentaho's Escape program offers conversion from Actuate e.Reports, Brio, Cognos Impromptu, Crystal Reports, and Oracle Reports.
Jared Cornelius, product marketing manager for Pentaho, tells 5 Minute Briefing that "there are many new features in version 3.5, including user prompts for cascading parameters, visualization and dashboard drill-down tools, and the ability to create multiple reports at the same time. There is also the ability to see the user console in a web browser, to generate output as pdf reports or excel spreadsheets, and to do business queries against a centralized metadata layer."
For more information, and to try a free 30-day evaluation copy of Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition Version 3.5, go here.