Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:
Do you need to integrate data from multiple sources? Pentaho is great for this. Previously, we were SSHing files around and importing with numerous cron scripts.
Are your Finance and Marketing teams constantly asking for one-off queries? Pentaho puts this power in THEIR hands so they can pull and arrange the data they want into whatever view they want.
Do you want to pay too much for a full-featured BI solution? Pentaho is very reasonably priced, and even has a free version!
It has been too long since we did the research (over three years) before choosing Pentaho so I cannot remember exactly which competing products we looked at. In the end, the problem with all the others was that they were too expensive for our small company. Pentaho was reasonably priced and was exactly what we were looking for.
Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, SAS all provide similar, but very expensive products. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?
Pentaho serves several roles in our environment.
We use the Pentaho Report Designer for report design and delivery. This tool is fairly straightforward. It feels a lot like Crystal Reports and similar tools. Once reports are complete they are immediately accessible to our end users.
We use Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) for Business Intelligence which includes totals, trends, and forecasts of sales and subscriptions of our services. The browser-based analysis tool allows our end-users to drag & drop measures and dimensions and instantly convert raw data into a variety of graphical representations.
Before we had Pentaho, each view might have required a long query or static report that was hand-exported to Excel. With Pentaho's analysis tool, our sales, finance, and marketing teams have instant insight and infinitely flexible views of our data. Are your Finance and Marketing teams constantly asking for one-off queries? Pentaho puts this power in THEIR hands so they can pull and arrange the data they want into whatever view they want.
In the IT department, we use Pentaho as a scheduling engine for data maintenance jobs as its interface allows us to manage multiple shards from a single source. Previously, we were SSHing files around and importing with numerous cron scripts.
Pentaho is very reasonably priced, and even has a free version!
Pentaho has had tremendous positive influence on how we run our business. It gave us insight into our marketing successes and failures by showing us actual trends before and after pricing sales. It provides a visual representation of subscription revenue so we can accurately plan for marketing and sales strategies.
Pentaho freed up countless man-hours by adding simplicity to our daily data maintenance routines, providing a single interface for data sharded across numerous servers.
Pentaho eliminated time-consuming one-off queries and reports, providing a browser-based user interface that sales, marketing, and finance teams can access from anywhere at any time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
