Enhanced Integration Streamlines Data Preparation, Delivers Advanced Data Mining Integrated with ETL

Orlando, FL – Dec 6, 2007 – Pentaho Corp., creator of the world's most popular open source business intelligence (BI) suite, today announced new features designed to help end-user organizations rapidly deliver advanced predictive analytic solutions, providing deeper insight into customer and prospect behavior, marketing ROI, and new market opportunities. This solution has been delivered by enhancing and integrating Pentaho's best-in-class open source data integration and data mining capabilities.

Organizations use data mining tools to understand relationships between internal factors like price or product placement as well as external factors like economic indicators, competition, and target market demographics; analyze the impact of potential changes to critical business metrics like sales volumes, customer loyalty, and profitability; and perform business-critical calculations such as market-basket analysis, customer segmentation, pricing optimization and fraud detection.

Traditionally, preparation of data for advanced analytical data mining applications has been costly and time-consuming. Large volumes of data and metadata typically need to be massaged into the proper formats to specifically map information like customer demographics that can have hundreds of attributes per customer record. Pentaho Data Integration can now produce the native format, known as an .ARFF file, required by Pentaho's popular Weka data mining project. This offers Weka users a proven, enterprise-class data integration platform to access and integrate disparate data sources and deliver the data in an "analytics-ready" format for Weka.

The new capabilities from Pentaho also allow organizations to incorporate advanced analytic models directly into their data warehousing processes, through direct integration of data mining models with Pentaho's open source ETL platform. For example, once a customer-scoring model has been created based on analysis of historical data, that scoring model can be used in a transformation step to generate scores on new customer records as those customer records are loaded into a data warehouse. Combined with the new statistical analytics transformations delivered recently in Pentaho Data Integration 3.0, this simplifies deployment and turns a traditional data integration job into a powerful data enrichment process.

Finally, the new capabilities also integrate data sampling into data integration processes. Data sampling provides and efficient but powerful way to derive trends and patterns in large volumes of data without having to individually analyze every record.

"These new capabilities really make it easier for users to realize the benefits of advanced analytic techniques delivered in a commercial open source model," said Mark Hall, long-time Weka project contributor and Lead Developer for Data Mining at Pentaho. "We've simplified the data preparation process for data mining, and made it possible for organizations to incorporate advanced analytics directly into their data warehousing process."

Subscription services including support and indemnification, as well as commercial licenses for Pentaho Data Mining are available immediately from Pentaho.

About Pentaho Corporation

Pentaho Corporation provides a full spectrum of open source Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities including reporting, analysis, dashboards, data mining, data integration, and a BI platform that have made it the world's most popular open source BI suite. Formed by a highly experienced team of industry veterans, Pentaho's mission is to bring innovative, high quality technology and professional support to the BI market. Pentaho uses a revolutionary approach to development, distribution and support made possible by a commercial open source business model. Pentaho is the primary sponsor and owner of popular open source projects including JFreeReport, Kettle, Mondrian, and Weka. Pentaho's technologies support a wide range of business initiatives from sales and profitability analysis, customer analysis, HR reporting, Financial reporting, KPI dashboards, Supply Chain analytics, and operational reporting. For more information, visit www.pentaho.com/ or weka.pentaho.org.