Pentaho adds to open-source enterprise BI suite

Pentaho has updated its open-source business intelligence tools to offer functionality designed to rival proprietary offerings in the business intelligence sector, the company said on Wednesday.

Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition 3.8 introduces new features, including guided analysis, interactive dashboards and in-memory data caching, which allow for a more agile business intelligence (BI) strategy, Pentaho said.

"With Pentaho, BI solutions are quicker to build, easier to adapt and deliver faster time to value. The new features in Pentaho BI Suite 3.8 move even closer to eliminating the gap between commercial open source and proprietary BI," the company said in a statement.

The guided analysis tools include designers for reports and online analytical processing (OLAP) analysis while the enhanced dashboards allow dashboards to be created with "zero coding", according to Pentaho.

The suite also now includes better data integration with Hadoop, adding new dedicated MapReduce steps that the company said makes it easier to use as a visual interface for Hadoop jobs.

Rounding off the list of key developments is the introduction of in-memory caching of data, which Pentaho said "dramatically improves performance" when working with particularly large reports or those with lots of parameters or pages.

Rival open-source BI vendor, Jaspersoft — providers of the Jaspersoft 4 BI suite — told ZDNet UK in February that companies are now looking to the notion of "self-service BI" and that it will be focusing on mobile and the cloud in order to meet the demands of customers.

Recent updates to Jaspersoft 4 include the expansion of the Jaspersoft Live cloud BI platform and Jaspersoft Big Data Connectors that allow native reporting of Hadoop and various NoSQL data, as well as massively parallel processing (MPP) analytic databases.