The Pentaho BI Project is open source application software for enterprise reporting, analysis, dashboard, data mining, workflow and ETL capabilities for business intelligence needs. It is a complete business intelligence platform that includes reporting, analysis (OLAP), dashboards, data mining and data integration (ETL).
One of the many benefits commercial open source business intelligence (BI) provides is the ability to allocate business intelligence budget where it counts — not on large, up front software licenses, but on the professional services and expertise it takes to ensure that your BI project is successful. Pentaho offers a wide range of consulting services for the design, development, deployment, and maintenance of applications based on the Pentaho Open BI Suite.
Pentaho BI Suite is a platform that has a wide range of functionality:
Pentaho Reporting - Pentaho Reporting is a collection of open source projects primarily focused on the creation, generation, and distribution of rich and sophisticated report content from all sources of informattion. Pentaho reporting provides both scheduled and on-demand report publishing in popular formats such as PDF, XLS, HTML and text. Pentaho Reporting is based on the JFreeReport project. It supports output to display devices, printers, PDF, Excel, HTML, XHTML, PlainText, XML and CSV files.
Pentaho Analysis - it provides extensive analysis capabilities that includes a pivot table viewes (JPivot), advanced graphical displays (using SVG or Flash), integrated dashboard widgets, data mining, portal and workflow integration. Additionally, Pentaho Spreadsheet Services allows users to browse, drill, pivot and chart from within Microsoft Excel. Analysis Services are based on Mondrian OLAP (Open Source OLAP Server).
Pentahon Dashboards - all components including Reporting and Analysis can contribute content to Pentaho dashboards. It provides re-usable display widgets (like gauges, dials, charts) which can be embedded into applications, JSPs, or within JSR-168 compliant portals.
Data Mining - it incorporates Weka, a collection of machine learning algorithms applied to data mining tasks. These algorithms are combined with OLAP technologies to provide intelligent data analysis to end users. Data mining tools can analyze historical data to create predictive models and then distribute this information using Pentaho Reporting and Analysis.
Data Integration is realized by an ETL tool called Kettle, which was aquired by Pentaho. The tool provides graphical user interface for the job design and high scalability and flexibility for the data processing.
