Pentaho Corporation, an open source business analytics company, has formed a strategic partnership with DataStax, a provider of big data solutions built upon the Apache Cassandra project, a high performance NoSQL database. The relationship will provide native integration between Pentaho Kettle and Apache Cassandra. This will merge the scalable, low-latency performance of Cassandra with Kettle's visual interface for high-performance ETL, as well as integrated reporting, visualization and interactive analysis capabilities.
According to the companies, organizations seeking to leverage their big data have found it difficult to implement and employ analytics technologies. "One of the big challenges today is ease of use of these tools," says Ian Fyfe, Pentaho's chief technology evangelist. Often built on open source projects, it "takes a lot of deep skills to use these systems, and these are skills that are hard to find," he explains.
In response, Pentaho and DataStax have teamed up to provide organizations with a big data analytics solution that has an easy to use point-and-click interface. This solution, Fyfe contends, can also help an organization's bottom line. "Instead of hiring that costly Java developer, you can use more traditional IT people or data scientists to get the job done using our visual interface."
Since the emergence of big data, organizations have struggled to extract value from it. Fyfe says that in the past it's been either economically unfeasible or technically challenging to store big data using traditional relational database technologies. This trend, however, is changing, as more organizations are now able to leverage their big data through solutions such as the one provided by Pentaho and DataStax. "This is unleashing a whole new area where it's now becoming possible to both technically and economically to store this data and analyze this data, and there is business value hidden within that data," says Fyfe.
Earlier this week, Shareable Ink, "an enterprise cloud computing provider that transforms paper documentation to structured data," announced it was implementing Pentaho Business Analytics to help develop a big data analytics platform for the healthcare sector. Also this week, TravelTainment, a "provider of multi-channel distribution platforms" in the travel industry, announced it was employing Pentaho to analyze and report on their big data stores. These examples, according to the vendors, illustrate the value big data analytics has and how it has emerged as an asset to many organizations.
For more information about Pentaho, go to www.pentaho.com.
For more about DataStax, go to www.datastax.com.