Pentaho enhances usability with BI suite improvements

Business intelligence firm Pentaho has updated its flagship enterprise software with interactive reporting capabilities and a redesigned user interface.

Pentaho BI 4 Enterprise Edition now allows business users to create their own standard reports without the help of IT, and explore the information they want, said Davy Nys, Pentaho director of Europe.

"Its aim is to give even more power to the user," said Nys. "We focus on the core capabilities that business users require."

Pentaho's BI suite boasts full analytics and reporting functionality, including online analytical processing (OLAP), dashboards and ad-hoc analysis.

The vendor has also updated its reports functionality with drag-and-drop capabilities to make them more user friendly.

Meanwhile, a new visual interface allows businesses to customise the application according to their own standards or existing applications.

"It hasn't just got a better colour scheme. It allows users to customise the look and feel," said Nys.

The new Pentaho suite additionally has multi-chart visualisation capabilities that enhance the process of data discovery, said Nys.

"A lot of proprietary firms have made heavy investments in BI, but are still working on integrating acquisitions from a few years ago. We have built our architecture from the ground up, so it includes back-end processing to data visualisation tools," he added.

Enterprises are increasingly showing an interest in open-source BI players, like Pentaho, Actuate and Jaspersoft, as they seek to lower software costs.

In fact, the move to open source and SaaS offerings was highlighted by Gartner as a contributing factor in the slowing down of Europe's enterprise software sales.