Hitachi Vantara Delivers More Valuable Data Insights With Pentaho 8.2

Hitachi Vantara, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. announced Pentaho 8.2, the newest release of the company’s data integration and analytics platform software, providing new, out-of-the-box integration with Hitachi’s industry-leading object storage platform, Hitachi Content Platform (HCP). Pentaho 8.2 better integrates Hitachi Vantara’s portfolio of products and enables users to address key industry use cases with access to unstructured data from HCP. This release also enables customers to manage a hybrid cloud environment in new ways and expands support for the analytic ecosystem.

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Pentaho 8.2 Makes Unstructured Data Available for Analytics
According to Harvard Business Review, less than half of an organization’s structured data is used in making business decisions, and less than 1% of unstructured data is used in any way at all. With Pentaho’s new integration with HCP, users can now build data pipelines that include structured and unstructured data sources – such as text, video, audio, images, social media, clickstreams and log files – allowing data analysts and data scientists to generate better insights that drive more business value. Pentaho 8.2 opens new industry use cases in areas such as:

• Banking: Financial services institutions can address compliance requirements by correlating trading transaction data with email communications.
• Healthcare: Medical researchers can make new drug discoveries by blending patient data and medication history with unstructured MRI scans.
• Retail: Retailers can analyze the shopping preferences of each guest and the traffic flow of each in-store brand by combining in-store video footage with point-of-sale data.
• Public Safety: Law enforcement can combine video footage with crime reports, enabling faster access to evidence and improved decision-making while staying compliant with regulations.

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Easier Hybrid Cloud Data Management 
With so many alternatives for data lakes – including NoSQL databases, public cloud options from Microsoft Azure, Amazon and Google, and on-premises object stores – organizations are taking a closer look at the best way to spend on data management and govern this data to comply with regulations. Pentaho 8.2 delivers access to new and better ways to manage data when used together with Hitachi Content Platform. For example, users can now onboard data into HCP, which functions as a data lake. Then they can use Pentaho to prepare, cleanse and normalize data within HCP.  Pentaho may then be used to make the logical determination of which prepared data is appropriate for each cloud target. By reducing unnecessary data sent to the cloud, organizations can now better manage costs with Pentaho 8.2.

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Expanded Analytics Ecosystem Support
Pentaho 8.2 expands support for its growing ecosystem of third-party products and technologies that help organizations optimize their data pipeline and analytics projects:

• AMQP support: Pentaho customers can access this popular messaging protocol that helps organizations read and publish streaming data from edge devices to the cloud for addressing emerging IoT use cases.
• Improved Google Cloud security: Support for customer managed encryption keys (CMEK) gives Pentaho users additional protection by controlling their own data encryption keys while accessing data in Google Cloud Storage and Google BigQuery.
• Python Step:  Pentaho 8.2 users can operationalize machine learning and deep learning models built with Python and make API calls to popular libraries such as scikit-learn and TensorFlow.
• OpenJDK support:  Pentaho customers can now switch from OpenJDK, which now comes with commercial terms, to a free and open source version of OpenJDK.

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Supporting Quotes
“With Pentaho 8.2 and Hitachi Content Platform, we’re able to leverage both structured and unstructured data on a single platform to send cleansed, prepared data to AWS and Microsoft Azure, and will achieve a 20-30% compute cost reduction and a 50%-60% storage cost reduction as a result,” said Andrew Buffone, director of data management at CARFAX Canada. “We’re also able to better govern both the structured and unstructured data we deliver to our business and data science teams by managing it all in one place.”

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“Supporting modern data analytics projects involves the creation of agile data pipelines that are able to rapidly and automatically integrate both structured and unstructured data from multiple sources and make it available for multiple use cases,” said Matt Aslett, research vice president of data, AI and analytics at 451 Research. “Given its portfolio of products, such as Pentaho 8.2, Hitachi Vantara is well placed to help customers become more data-driven, especially in industries with an abundance of unstructured data.”

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