Pentaho acquired by HDS

Pentaho acquired by HDS – what it means for Australia and New Zealand

A couple of days ago, Pentaho got acquired by Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) for a reported cool half a billion bucks. This valuation reflects the success of Pentaho in the analytics and big data space and the expected continued success of the platform.

This deal was announced about 4 months ago, and since that time we at BizCubed have been heavily engaging with the local HDS team here in Australia and New Zealand, the original founders of Pentaho and the global Pentaho community. It is still early days, but we believe that this is very good news for the existing Pentaho base, for the platform generally and ultimately for the world (and we say that without any exaggeration or cynicism).

For the existing base of users here in Australia and New Zealand, having a significant organisation locally will mean better support from a customer experience, technical and engagement perspective. We’re already exploring ways of making it easier to consume the product from a commercial perspective and faster to deliver results from a technical perspective. In several cases those explorations are in pilot phases with some of our current customers.

Pentaho engineering has already dedicated additional focus to help drive the platform forward in terms of JIRAs actioned (bugs, issues & features requests), updates made and engagement with community members around the world. BizCubed is also building a tighter relationship with the engineering team to deliver more complete and complex solutions for our clients. We see this continuing because of the plans and expectations that have been shared with us from the HDS team locally.

The part of HDS that Pentaho will exist under is called “Social Innovation”. This group’s stated goal is “Making the world safer, more secure and smarter.” The Pentaho platform is a key piece of this strategy, but ultimately we see the technical part being only a small portion of the overall solution. Making the world a better place requires people to engage with technology – this is where we see the strength of the Pentaho platform. The commercial model (no per-user pricing), the development model (open) and the deployment model (no xml/code) means that it is accessible to everyone in the organisation – there is capability that the most senior of board members can use as well as the most technical data scientists to deploy. The platform provides access to data to make a difference, without the barriers that other platforms put in front of you.

The future is bright for our customers locally and zthe platform will only continue to improve. We’re excited by the potential to help HDS make the world smarter, safer and more secure.