The World's Most Popular Open Source BI Suite

The Pentaho BI Suite provides a full spectrum of business intelligence (BI) capabilities including query and reporting, interactive analysis, dashboards, data integration/ETL, data mining, and a BI platform that has made it the world's most popular open source BI suite.

Choose the complete suite, or use only the pieces you need to meet specific business requirements. Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition includes:

	Pentaho Reporting - Access data and deliver information to the organization
	Pentaho Analysis - Explore and analyze data interactively with rapid response
	Pentaho Dashboards - Get immediate visibility into metrics and KPIs
	Pentaho Data Integration - Cleanse and integrate data wherever it exists
	Pentaho Data Mining - Discover hidden patterns and indicators of future performance

The Smart and Safe Alternative for BI

Pentaho's commercial open source model eliminates large, upfront software license fees and dramatically reduces the total cost of ownership for enterprise-class business intelligence compared to traditional, proprietary BI.

All organizations use reporting in one form or another. As a result, reporting is considered a core Business Intelligence (BI) need and is frequently the first BI application deployed. Pentaho Reporting allows organizations to easily access, format, and distribute information to employees, customers, and partners.

• Flexible deployment from standalone desktop reporting to embedded reporting and enterprise business intelligence
• Broad data source support including relational, OLAP, or XML-based data sources
• Popular output options including Adobe PDF, HTML, Microsoft Excel, Rich Text Format, or plain text
• Web-based ad hoc query and reporting for business users
• Enterprise Edition provides enhanced software functionality, comprehensive professional technical support, product expertise, certified software and software maintenance, and more

Pentaho Report Designer

The Pentaho Report Designer gives report authors everything they need to connect to data and design pixel-perfect reports for delivery over the web or via email and has helped make Pentaho Reporting the most widely-used open source reporting product.  Pentaho Report Designer delivers productivity and flexibility for report authors with a rich feature set delivered via a low-cost commercial open source model.

• Design reports quickly with the streamlined report wizard that takes authors from a blank canvas to a highly polished report in four simple steps.
• Connect to diverse data sources including relational data, Pentaho Analysis, flat files, java objects, or even stream data directly from Pentaho Data Integration transformations to design reports.
• Create and view user prompts, including dynamic cascading prompts.
• Publish directly to the BI server to give business users instant access to the information they need.
• Add rich data visualizations with over 15 customizable chart types, barcodes, sparklines, survey scales, and more.
• Localize reports easily to support multi-lingual deployment with a single report file.
• Embed HTML and JavaScript controls for dynamic and interactive online reports.
• Fine-tune reports using the built-in interactive preview mode.

Pentaho Dashboards provide immediate insight into individual, departmental, or enterprise performance. By delivering key metrics in an attractive and intuitive visual interface, Pentaho dashboards gives business users the critical information they need to understand and improve organizational performance.

Pentaho Dashboards delivers this visibility by providing:

• Rich, interactive displays including Adobe Flash-based visualizations so that business users can immediately see which business metrics are on track, and which need attention
• Self-service dashboard designer that lets business users easily create personalized dashboards with zero training
• Integration with Pentaho Reporting and Pentaho Analysis so that users can drill to underlying reports and analysis to understand what factors are contributing to good or bad performance
• Portal integration to make it easy to deliver relevant business metrics to large numbers of users, seamlessly integrated into their application
• Integrated alerting to continuously monitor for exceptions and notify users to take action

Once you've got analysis, reporting, and dashboards deployed, it's time to take your business intelligence (BI) to the next level by adding data mining and advanced analytics. This is a level of BI excellence that many organizations never manage to evolve to, however the importance of pushing ahead with advanced capabilities cannot be underestimated - they can provide a truly sustainable competitive advantage and enable your organization to maximize both its efficiency and effectiveness.

Data Mining is the process of running data through sophisticated algorithms to uncover meaningful patterns and correlations that may otherwise be hidden. These can be used to help you understand the business better and also exploited to improve future performance through predictive analytics. For example, data mining can warn you there’s a high probability a specific customer won’t pay on time based on an analysis of customers with similar characteristics.

To help you fully utilize data mining for organizational advantage, the Pentaho BI Project team has worked in conjunction with the development and business communities to integrate mainstream BI capabilities with advanced data mining. Pentaho Data Mining is differentiated by its open, standards-compliant nature, use of Weka data mining technology, and tight integration with core business intelligence capabilities including reporting, analysis and dashboards. Other data mining offerings lack this level of sophistication and integration.

In this document we cover the business benefits of integrating data mining as part of your business intelligence deployment, together with the how’s and why’s of data mining to provide you with a solid understanding of this topic.

Pentaho Data Mining can be deployed as:

• An out-of-the-box solution for immediate deployment to analysts. As far as end-users are concerned, data mining operates entirely in the background – users see results and recommendations through e-mail or other web pages, which can include Pentaho Dashboards.
• A set of components that enable Java™ developers to quickly create custom reporting solutions using Java Objects or Java Server Pages (JSPs). These can be tightly integrated with other applications or portals.
• Together with other components of the overall Pentaho BI Suite

Features and Benefits

Provides insight into hidden patterns and relationships in your data

• A classic example of data mining is a retailer who uncovers a relationship between sales of diapers and beer on Sunday afternoons – two items you wouldn’t normally consider as linked. The explanation is that husbands who are sent out to pick up a fresh supply of diapers are also likely to pick up some beer while they happen to be in the store – something that hadn’t been recognized as a significant sales driver before data mining uncovered it.

Enables you to exploit these correlations to improve organizational performance

• Continuing the example above, very often retailers act on the relationships they discover by using tactics such as placing linked items together on end-of-isle displays as a way to spur additional purchases. All organizations can benefit from acting in a similar way – using newly discovered patterns and correlations as the basis for taking action to improve their efficiency and effectiveness.

Provides indicators of future performance

• “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is a famous quote from philosopher George Santayana. In the case of data mining, being able to predict outcomes based on historic data can dramatically improve the quality and outcomes of decision making in the present. As a simple example, if the best indicator of whether a customer will pay on time turns out to be a combination of their market segment and whether or not they have paid previous bills on time, then this is information you can usefully benefit from in making current credit decisions.

Enables embedding of recommendations in your applications

• You can use the data mining results to display a simple summary statement and recommendations within operational applications. For example, on a credit screen you could add: “Based on this new account profile there is an 85% chance this customer will pay late. It is therefore recommended you require a 50% prepayment on this order”. Reporting on aggregate results such as Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) enables you to measure business improvements based on when recommendations were followed and when they weren’t so that you can fine-tune your model and recommendations over time for optimal effect.

Enables you to take full advantage of a range of data mining algorithms

• No algorithm is likely to be optimal in all situations. For this reason it’s important that you’re able to try out a range to find the algorithm that fits a particular set of data the best.
• If you find several data mining algorithms that fit well, you can use all of them - for example: “Based on analysis of 3 predictive models, the chances this customer will pay late are; Model A: 95% (96% correct), Model B: 89% (92% correct), Model C: 76% (97% correct)”.

Technology

Powerful Data Mining Engine

• Provides a comprehensive set of machine learning algorithms from the Weka project including clustering, segmentation, decision trees, random forests, neural networks, and principal component analysis.
• Pentaho has added integration with Pentaho Data Integration and automated the process of transforming data into the format the data mining engine needs.
• Algorithms can either be applied directly to a dataset or called from Java code.
• Output can be viewed graphically, interacted with programmatically, or used data source for reports, further analysis, and other processes.
• Filters are provided for discretization, normalization, re-sampling, attribute selection, and transforming and combining attributes.
• Classifiers provide models for predicting nominal or numeric quantities. Learning schemes include decision trees and lists, instance-based classifiers, support vector machines, multi-layer perceptrons, logistic regression, Bayes’ nets, and other advanced techniques.
• The data mining engine is also well-suited for developing new machine learning schemes, enabling customers to incorporate their own models.
• Inputs and outputs can be controlled programmatically, enabling developers to create completely custom solutions using the components provided.

Graphical Design Tools

• Graphical user interfaces are provided for data pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules, and visualization.

Data is everywhere. Providing a consistent, single version of the truth across all sources of information is one of the biggest challenges faced by IT organizations today. Pentaho Data Integration delivers powerful Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) capabilities using an innovative, metadata-driven approach. With an intuitive, graphical, drag and drop design environment, and a proven, scalable, standards-based architecture, Pentaho Data Integration is increasingly the choice for organizations over traditional, proprietary ETL or data integration tools.

With Pentaho Data Integration 4.0, Pentaho is redefining the way that BI applications are built and deployed.  Utilizing Pentaho’s Agile BI approach, Pentaho Data Integration unifies the ETL, modeling and visualization processes into a single, integrated environment that enables developers and end-users to work seamlessly together.  The end result is that BI developers and end users can build BI applications more quickly, easily and at a small fraction of the cost of traditional solutions.  Pentaho’s Agile BI:

• Powers instantaneous, iterative BI application development
• Enables seamless collaboration between developers and end users
• Merges complex BI development into a single process
• Dramatically reduces time and difficulty of building and deploying BI apps

Pentaho Data Integration's metadata-driven approach means you simply specify WHAT you want to do, but not HOW you want to do it. Now administrators can create complex transformations and jobs in a graphical, drag-and-drop environment without having to generate any custom code. Pentaho Data Integration is a full-featured ETL solution including:

• Rich transformation library with over 100 out-of-the-box mapping objects
• Broad data source support including packaged applications, over 30 open source and proprietary database platforms, flat files, Excel documents, and more
• Advanced data warehousing support for Slowly Changing and Junk Dimensions
• Proven enterprise-class performance and scalability
• Integration with the Pentaho BI Suite for Enterprise Information
• Integration (EII), advanced scheduling, and process integration
• Unified ETL, modeling and visualization development environment for design of BI applications

Common use cases for Pentaho Data Integration include:

• Data warehouse population
• Agile design of BI applications
• Information enrichment by integrating data from various sources
• Data migration between applications
• Imports of data into databases from text-files, Excel spreadsheets, relational systems and more
• Data cleansing by applying complex conditions in data transformations
• Exploration of data in existing databases (tables, views, etc.)

Pentaho Analysis puts rich, analytic power in the hands of your business users helping them gain the insight and understanding needed to make optimal business decisions.

• Freely explore business information by drilling into and cross-tabulating data
• Experience speed-of-thought response times to complex analytical queries
• View information multi-dimensionally, choosing specific metrics and attributes to analyze
• Deploy stand-alone or integrated with other products in the Pentaho BI Suite

Pentaho Analyzer

Pentaho Analyzer provides intuitive, interactive analytical reporting letting non-technical business users quickly understand business information. As part of the enhanced functionality in Pentaho Analysis Enterprise Edition, Analyzer features:

• Web-based, drag-and-drop report creation
• Advanced sorting and filtering
• Customized totals and user-defined calculations
• Chart visualizations
• And much more