Pentaho BI Suite 3.8 Puts More Power in the Hands of End Users

Orlando, Fla — March 16, 2011 — Pentaho Corporation, the pioneer in agile business intelligence(BI), today announced the worldwide general availability (GA) of Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition 3.8.  Pentaho is widely recognized as providing the only fully integrated commercial open source BI suite covering the full spectrum of BI needs including ETL, reporting, analysis (OLAP), dashboards and data mining.  This release focuses on enabling business users to design rich, interactive BI solutions that seamlessly integrate all forms of information delivery. 

With this release, Pentaho further delivers on the Pentaho Agile BI promise to reinvent the way BI is designed and deployed.  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 by offering the majority of the functionality provided by proprietary BI mega-vendors at a fraction of the cost.

The new functionality in Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition 3.8 includes:

• Guided analysis– designers for reports, OLAP analysis, and dashboards now provide simple ways for end users to define linksfrom one document to another, thus creating guided navigation paths to additional detail or related information.
• Interactive dashboards with zero coding – building upon the guided analysis enhancements, Dashboard Designer allows designers to use content links to dynamically drive the filtering of other widgets displayed within the same dashboard.
• Rich library of design tools – designers can now choose from a library of filter control types including buttons, radio groups, calendar controls and more for adding interactivity to their dashboards.
• Data-less design– this new query mode allows users to design the layout of an Analyzer report before querying the underlying database.  This can help reduce database traffic and accelerate analytic report design when analyzing large amounts of data.
• Data caching– Pentaho Reporting now includes an intelligent in-memory caching layer that dramatically improves performance when working with large, parameterized or paginated reports.
• Deeper integration with Hadoop for Big Data– Pentaho Data Integration adds new-dedicated MapReduce steps to simplify the design of transformations as mappers, reducers, or combiners, making it even easier to use as a visual interface for orchestration of Hadoop jobs.

QUOTES AND MULTIMEDIA

 “We are listening to our customers,” said Ian Fyfe, Chief Technology Evangelist for Pentaho. “Pentaho BI Suite 3.8 includes a host of high value, customer requested features that significantly reduce the technical barriers preventing end users from creating rich, interactive Business Intelligence solutions.  We encourage companies to see for themselves by downloading a free, 30-Day evaluation of Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition.”

• Download a free 30-day trial of Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition 3.8.
• Attend the webcast “What’s new in Pentaho BI Suite 3.8” on Thursday, March 17^th to learn more and watch a demo of the new functionality.
• Read the blog by Jake Cornelius, Director of Product Management at Pentaho, “What’s New in Pentaho BI Suite 3.8”.
• Visit the Pentaho digital newsroom to learn more about this announcement and other happenings at Pentaho. Join the conversation on our Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Xing.