PentahoWorld 2015 kicked off today at the Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida, hometown of the Pentaho Corp. headquarters. Following the opening keynote presentations, Dave Vellante and George Gilbert, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, assessed the big developments revealed so far, as well as upcoming events for the rest of the conference.

One of the hottest talking points was the recent acquisition of Pentaho by Hitachi Data Systems Corp. (Hitachi, Ltd.) and Hitachi’s strong focus on diversification, its push toward a firmer Internet of Things (IoT) strategy, and its plans for handling Big Data enterprises.

Mix and match

Also on the table was a discussion of Pentaho’s platform and its continued expansion, with Vellante characterizing it as a “robust platform” with “a lot of customization capabilities.”

Gilbert’s interest was piqued by the mix-and-match functionality of Pentaho’s utilities, and the versatility of its applications.

“Mix and match could be something as simple as the extract/transfer load,” said Gilbert, who gave as one example: predictive and prescriptive analytics, machine learning, graph processing and drawing in data from various sources among the numerous other points of interest for that subject.

Emphasizing the increasing importance of this aspect, he stated, “It’s a mix-and-match world.” He also noted, in reference to the relatively new viability of hybrid functionality, “Cloud vendors are trying to marry the mix-and-match functionality with the simplicity that came from the traditional data warehouse.”

Spark and Hadoop

Another major issue discussed was the rise of Apache Spark and the competition it offered to the established service of the Apache Hadoop framework. By relying on memory over hardware, its higher speed of calculation offers an attractive alternative for companies processing certain types of workloads. The handling of management, security and data lineage as these data-handling migrations take place and the adaptations that may be called for as Spark continues to rise will be key points for the rest of the conference.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of PentahoWorld 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE