Bizcubed - Business Intelligence Experts

Pentaho Announces Kettle for Big Data

Christian Hyland — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:40:07 +0000

Pentaho has announced today that it is open sourcing all big data capabilities in Pentaho Kettle 4.3 and moving Pentaho Kettle from LGPL to Apache License 2.0.

Open sourcing will accelerate the development of Pentaho's big data capabilities by creating viral downloads and hands-on experimentation with big data developers, analysts and data scientists. As with its other initiatives, Pentaho expects this decision to create advocates within each big data community and the Pentaho Kettle community. The aim is to make PDI/Kettle the de-facto standard for operationalising big data. This could provide an on-ramp for new deployments of the full Pentaho Business Analytics suite around the world.

According to Zachary Zeus of BizCubed, "The practical effects of this announcement are that many more people within organisations will be able use Pentaho Data Integration to 'hard wire' analytics into business processes in an extremely cost effective manner. It's another tool for creating strategic knowledge assets." He added that "BizCubed will be adding these Big Data developments to Australia and New Zealand training events".

Pentaho believes that Kettle for Big Data delivers the following key benefits to developers, analysts and data scientists:

Delivers 10x boost in productivity for developers
- Visual tools that reduce or eliminate the need to write code such as Java MapReduce, Pig, Hive, or NoSQL database scripts;
Makes big data platforms usable for a huge breadth of developers
- Whereas previously big data platforms were usable only by developers with deep specific skills such as the ability write Hadoop MapReduce jobs and Pig scripts;
Enables easy visual orchestration of big data tasks
- Such as Hadoop MapReduce jobs, Pentaho MapReduce jobs, Pig scripts, Hive queries, HBase queries, as well as traditional IT tasks such as data mart/warehouse loads and operational data extract-transform-load jobs;
Fully leverages the full capabilities of each big data platform
- Native integration with each one, while enabling easy co-existence and migration between big data platforms and traditional relational databases;
Provides a super-easy on-ramp to Pentaho Business Analytics
- Full data discovery and visualization capabilities including reporting, dashboards, interactive data analysis, data mining and predictive data analysis.

Integration Q & A

Big data capabilities available under open source Pentaho Kettle 4.3 include the ability input, output, manipulate and report on data using the following Hadoop and NoSQL stores:

Apache Cassandra, Hadoop HDFS, Hadoop MapReduce, Apache Hive, Apache Hbase, MongoDB and Hadapt Adaptive Analytical Platform and HPCC.

In addition, Pentaho Kettle makes available job orchestration steps for:

Hadoop, Amazon EMR, Pentaho MapReduce, HDFS File Operations, and Pig scripts.

Pentaho Kettle can execute ETL transforms:

Outside the Hadoop cluster
Or within the nodes of the cluster taking advantage of Hadoop’s distributed processing and reliability

Pentaho Kettle’s Hadoop capabilities work with all major Hadoop distributions:

Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Apache Hadoop, Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH), Cloudera Enterprise, Greenplum HD, HortonWorks Data Platform powered by Apache Hadoop, and MapR’s M3 Free and M5 Edition.

We are hiring – Business Analytics Consultant

Christian Hyland — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:58:32 +0000

Job Description

Be a leader on a team helping to make better decisions business as usual. As a Business Analytics Consultant at BizCubed you will use your client engagement skills, technical know-how and experience managing small teams (3-5 people) to deliver programs of work that improve how organisations access and report information.

Your role will involve orchestrating technology driven projects with a focus on industrial re-engineering and operational improvement. You will need to liaise between IT professionals and business groups such as operations, finance, human resources, sales and logistics. You will be expected to coordinate tasks with precision and have a methodical approach to handling complexity.

Desired Skills & Experience

While no formal technical training is required, the successful candidate will have at 5-10 years of experience working with business analytics. You will understand how data is captured, stored and distributed at the enterprise level. Most importantly, you will know how to source information from disparate systems and package it in meaningful ways for decision makers.

Applicants will be evaluated equally on three measures:

Technical expertise
Business acumen
Client engagement skills

Note: we can only consider people who have a work visa, work permit or residency in Australia.

Please send your CV and a few paragraphs about yourself and why this role is a good fit for your skills to: careers@bizcubed.com.au

We’ll contact people for interviews.

Thank you!

Company Description

BizCubed is an integrated business advisory and technology firm. Formed by experienced executives with a passion for smart technology, our unique skill is accelerating the adoption of business analytics programs. We get results for organisations with an abundance of data in disparate systems that need a an ROI on their IT investment – fast.

Our consultants are delivering solutions for national insurers, banks, agri-businesses, transportation companies, retailers and government agencies at the state and federal level.

BizCubed advocates for open standards technology and we are proud to be the Gold Partner for Pentaho Business Analytics in Australia and New Zealand.

Additional Information

Type: Full-time
Experience: Mid-Senior level
Functions: Consulting
Industries: Information Technology and Services
Compensation:Subject to experience

Gartner’s user advice for OS BI

Christian Hyland — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:10:23 +0000

Gartner Analyst: Andreas Bitterer

User Advice: Potential customers should be aware that, in practice, open-source BI tools generally ought not to mean free software. Customers should always subscribe to fee-based service agreements to guarantee product support, unless the tools are to be used in non-critical environments. Also recognize that, while the larger vendors have reasonable support structures, some small-scale open-source BI projects are supported solely by the open-source community and lack any SLAs.

Wotif partners with BizCubed to Accelerate Business Analytics program

Christian Hyland — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 03:02:06 +0000

Wotif has engaged BizCubed to accelerate the development of their business analytics program using Pentaho Enterprise BI.

It will be a close collaboration with the Wotif project team to ensure that know-how is transfered throughout the implementation. The outcomes we'll be working on are rapid system configuration along with business enablement through training and a best practices handover.

BizCubed consultants: Zachary Zeus and John Ballment.

New Pentaho Packages 2011-2012

Christian Hyland — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 08:52:04 +0000

Pentaho has revamped its commercial open source BI offering for 2011-2012

Now called Pentaho Business Analytics, the new packages are designed to balance product features and running costs for different scales of implementation. Pentaho's packages are now priced on features and users as well as the number of supported server cores.

The new features in the BI suite, Interactive Reporting and Interactive Analyzer, which are geared toward 'self-service reporting' are only available in the Professional and Enterprise Editions with unlimited users. Customers with smaller deployments can access this functionality on the new Limited Edition package but there is a limit of 20 concurrent users.

The annual subscription model with Level 1 and Level 2 support providing by certified local experts (like BizCubed) remains the same. As does the interoperability with other applications and the 'no lock-in' nature of the software that allows customers to continue to adopt the best tools for their operations.

Pentaho BI 4 Business Webinar

Christian Hyland — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 22:42:04 +0000

10:00-11:00 am on Thursday, 8 September 2011

Zach Zeus of BizCubed will explain the new features and functionality in the latest version of Pentaho BI.

Pentaho BI 4 is focused on amplifying end users reporting capabilities. We will demonstrate how the interactive reporting and the web-based drag and drop report designer allows users to perform lightweight data analysis.

Later in the session we will show how the inline formatting, column resizing, filters, sample data and data-less design modes work.

To register contact christian.hyland@bizcubed.com.au

New Pentaho book released – Pentaho Kettle Solutions

Christian Hyland — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 22:58:42 +0000

A complete guide to Pentaho Kettle, the Pentaho Data lntegration toolset for ETL
This practical book is a complete guide to installing, configuring, and managing Pentaho Kettle. If you’re a database administrator or developer, you’ll first get up to speed on Kettle basics and how to apply Kettle to create ETL solutions—before progressing to specialized concepts such as clustering, extensibility, and data vault models. Learn how to design and build every phase of an ETL solution.

Shows developers and database administrators how to use the open-source Pentaho Kettle for enterprise-level ETL processes (Extracting, Transforming, and Loading data)
Assumes no prior knowledge of Kettle or ETL, and brings beginners thoroughly up to speed at their own pace
Explains how to get Kettle solutions up and running, then follows the 34 ETL subsystems model, as created by the Kimball Group, to explore the entire ETL lifecycle, including all aspects of data warehousing with Kettle
Goes beyond routine tasks to explore how to extend Kettle and scale Kettle solutions using a distributed “cloud”

Get the most out of Pentaho Kettle and your data warehousing with this detailed guide—from simple single table data migration to complex multisystem clustered data integration tasks.

Open source BI enters the mainstream

Christian Hyland — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 01:45:04 +0000

In a report by Gartner’s Andreas Bitterer at the start of the year, the analyst made it clear that open-source business intelligence products are no longer solely the choice of price-conscious, small companies or a departmental stop-gap but have hit the mainstream.

Bitterer said that open-source BI competition is very much on the radar of the larger, incumbent suppliers, such as IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, Oracle and SAS Institute: “While often dismissed as being no competition, even the large established BI vendors have come up with countermeasures to address the challenges from the lower-cost competitors.”

A good example of the dismissal of these open-source BI providers came just last month, when the SAS Institute CEO Jim Goodnight said, “We haven’t noticed [open-source BI] a lot. Most of our companies need industrial-strength software that has been tested; put through every possible scenario or failure to make sure everything works correctly.”

But the open source firms believe they are leading a new wave in the business intelligence market.

Read full article

Pentaho Training Schedule 2011

jim — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 23:01:27 +0000

Our Pentaho Training schedule for 2011 is out. Check out our Pentaho training page for more info.
Here are the courses:

Pentaho BI Suite Bootcamp
1 November – 4 November, 2011 Register

Pentaho Data Integration for Database Developers (Kettle)
26 July – 29 July, 2011 Register

Event

julia — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 23:05:30 +0000