Pentaho Updates Commercial Open Source BI Suite for On-Premise and Cloud BI
Pentaho BI Suite Version 3 provides easy-to-use dashboards, convenient deployment options, and low-cost, community-powered BI
Pentaho Corporation, a commercial open-source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced Pentaho BI Suite Version 3, aimed at making it cost effective for businesses to deploy easy-to-use, robust BI capabilities to users throughout the organization.
Pentaho BI Suite Version 3 allows business users to easily create interactive dashboards -- including Adobe Flash-based visualizations -- without training.
Pentaho is introducing a Cloud Computing Edition, packaged for deployment on the Amazon EC2 Cloud, providing companies with another way to drive down the cost of bringing BI into their organizations.
A thriving and evolving Pentaho community, empowered by a new plug-in framework, is enabling rapid delivery of significant new product features.
New features in this release target key user segments:
For business users: Pentaho has added an easy-to-use, Web-based graphical dashboard designer requiring no training for business users, who can easily define personalized, interactive dashboards, including Adobe Flash-based visualizations, using theme-based templates. The dashboards can incorporate reports, analysis views and other Pentaho content, along with filter controls that synchronize dashboard content based on user selections for time periods, product lines, regions, and more.
For IT professionals: The Pentaho BI Suite Cloud Computing Edition is packaged for deployment in Cloud computing environments and will be delivered as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for deployment on Amazon EC2, so costs scale with usage. This avoids the onerous named-user, perpetual licensing structures of traditional BI packages. Cloud BI brings many of the benefits of software as a service (SaaS) to custom BI applications, including lower up-front costs and simplified infrastructure management. The new delivery model builds on the traction Pentaho has already established in Cloud business intelligence deployments with clients like Nutricia.
For Community Contributors: A new plug-in framework allows community members, OEMs, and system integrators to easily drop in extensions and other contributions. The plug-in architecture handles integration points, including menus and toolbars, registering new content types, repository integration, and content browsing, and physical deployment within Web and application servers.
Pentaho offers a free 30-day evaluations of Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition Version 3, downloadable from the Pentaho Web site: http://www.pentaho.com