Pentaho Brings Business Intelligence Customers More Choice

Pentaho, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced the availability of Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) support, integrated with Pentaho’s Data Integration and Data Mining modules. PMML support from Pentaho can provide interoperability or migration alternatives for end user organizations that have traditionally been subject to the extremely high acquisition and maintenance costs of traditional, proprietary analytical and data mining platforms from companies like SAS Institute, SPSS, and Microstrategy. Now those organizations can take advantage of the cost benefits of commercial open source BI from Pentaho, while reusing their existing investments and providing continuity in their deployments.

The Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) is an open standard, XML-based language developed by the Data Mining Group (DMG) which provides a way for applications to define statistical and data mining models and to share models between PMML compliant applications. PMML provides applications a vendor-independent method of defining models so that proprietary issues and incompatibilities are no longer a barrier to the exchange of models between applications. It allows users to develop models within one vendor's application, and use other vendors' applications to visualize, analyze, evaluate or otherwise use the models. Because it’s an open standard, PMML increases customer choice and reduces technology and vendor lock-in.

Specifically, the new support for PMML allows existing analytical and scoring models to be applied against data as that data is loaded through Pentaho Data Integration (ETL), and builds on the previously available integration between Pentaho’s data mining and ETL capabilities. For example, organizations that have developed models for scoring customers using demographic or historical information can apply those models and generate customer scores during the data preparation and integration process. Compatible analytical models can also be opened, viewed and validated within Pentaho Data Mining’s modeling environment, for further refinement and optimization of analytical techniques. Development of these new capabilities was led by Dr. Mark Hall, Ph. D, one of the key contributors to the Weka open source data mining project and now the technical lead for data mining at Pentaho.

"Utilizing predictive analytics can provide significant improvement to BI and deliver value to organizations ability to meet performance optimization efforts,” said Mark Smith CEO & EVP Research at Ventana Research. “Pentaho’s support of the PMML standard helps more easily support analytic needs of organization by integrating into their existing BI efforts.”

“High-end analytics has traditionally been the most expensive segment in the business intelligence market, but Pentaho is making analytics more affordable and accessible,” said Lance Walter, vice president of Marketing at Pentaho. “As high fees and complexity of proprietary BI offerings increase, customers are on the search for more affordable alternatives that won’t sacrifice functionality. With PMML support, Pentaho has made it even easier for those customers to reduce their BI costs while breaking free from technology and vendor lock-in.”

Users are invited to learn more about Pentaho’s new PMML capabilities at http://www.pentaho.com/products/data_mining/pmml/ .

About Pentaho Corporation

Pentaho Corporation is the commercial open source alternative for Business Intelligence (BI). Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition provides comprehensive reporting, OLAP analysis, dashboards, data integration, data mining and a BI platform that have made it the world's leading and most widely deployed open source BI suite. Pentaho's commercial open source business model eliminates software license fees, providing support, services, and product enhancements via an annual subscription. In the years since Pentaho's inception as the pioneer in commercial open source BI, Pentaho's products have been downloaded more than three million times, with production deployments at companies ranging from small organizations to The Global 2000. For more information, visit http://www.pentaho.com.