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“Many companies hoping to compete on the strength of their data are running into hurdles because they can’t provide enough people access to all the data they need to execute more effectively,” said David Stodder, vice president and research director at industry analyst firm Ventana Research. “Companies should evaluate integrated solutions like the one stemming from the Pentaho-Vertica partnership, which could enable companies to affordably equip more workers with state-of-the-art BI software and give them faster ad-hoc access to larger amounts of historical and real-time data so they can innovate sooner and better than competitors.”

This partnership gives companies a blueprint for extending comprehensive data analysis throughout the enterprise. Connecting easy-to-use BI tools on employees’ desktops with high-performance database management systems sets the stage for self-service analytics. As more employees become empowered to make critical business decisions, a company can gain a market advantage by capitalizing more quickly on business opportunities. Moreover, the simplicity of this solution enables IT staff to spend less time on setup and tuning, and more time delivering invaluable information in the form of dashboards and reports to a wider audience.

“BI tools and database management systems deliver the best business results if they’re accessible to a broad group of employees,” said Richard Daley, founder and CEO of Pentaho. “Making more data available to more people faster and more conveniently helps companies be more agile and competitive, which is paramount to success today and is the promise of this partnership.”

The Vertica® Analytic Database delivers query results 50 to 200 times faster than other databases. Vertica’s RDBMS enables business people to make complex, ad hoc queries on the fly and affordably. Vertica also allows mixed workloads because users can continue making queries while data is loaded into the system, eliminating the wait and sluggish performance many databases experience during loading. Breakthrough data compression allows the Vertica Database to reduce storage requirements by as much as 90 percent, dramatically cutting hardware overhead and energy consumption so that customers can analyze larger amounts of historical data at a fraction of the cost.

The Pentaho Open BI suite provides a comprehensive BI platform for reporting, analysis, dashboards, data mining, and data integration. Pentaho’s platform consists of four key elements: Pentaho Analysis, based on Pentaho’s popular Mondrian open source online analytical processing (OLAP) server, lets users pose questions in business terms; Pentaho Reporting lets users create, generate and distribute rich and sophisticated report content from all sources of information; Pentaho Data Integration, based on Pentaho’s Kettle data integration project, uses extract, transform and load (ETL) technology to gather data from multiple sources and integrate it for faster, easier access and analysis; and Weka machine-learning software simplifies data mining.

The Vertica Analytic Database integrates with the entire Pentaho suite to enable companies to optimize storage space and complex/ad hoc query speed within a comprehensive BI platform. “This partnership delivers on the largely unrealized potential of BI technology by making it usable, affordable and critical to business success,” said Ralph Breslauer, CEO of Vertica. “With this integration, companies can not only learn more about their customers and their markets, but they can also access that information quickly and immediately capitalize on it to gain a competitive advantage.”