As PentahoWorld 2015 opened at the Renaissance Orlando Resort in Florida this morning, Rosanne Saccone, chief marketing officer for Pentaho Corp., welcomed 550 guests from 27 countries with a diverse set of roles in the enterprise organization. Saccone noted that 60 percent of attendees held tech roles, 40 percent represented business roles and 40 percent held the title of executive.

The theme of the event, “The Power of Big Data,” represents how to drive the next generation of business value to the enterprise. Saccone acknowledged and welcomed Pentaho’s new parent company, Hitachi Data Systems Corp., to the show and then introduced the day’s first keynote speaker, Quentin Gallivan, CEO, Pentaho.

The future is analytics

As Gallivan took to the stage, he reviewed the industry today, as well as where it was headed. He stated that industry focus is no longer about data capture but about preparing for the future, and experts predict that by 2020, there will be 50 billion “things” connected to the Internet.

According to Gallivan, the tech priorities for the enterprise is analytics as he sees an “ever-expanding universe of data.” “The ROI is at the intersection of people, data and things,” he said. “These will drive revenues faster … and drive operating efficiencies for the enterprise.”

Breaking it down into five areas, Gallivan said the impact to the enterprise will be the need for real time/streaming, embedded analytics, data blending, governance and predictive modeling.

The evolving data lake

Gallivan remarked that the “data lake is coming of age.” He went on to metaphorically compare the earlier stages of the data lake to an awkward teenager who is cool and great but doesn’t know it yet. To describe where we are now, he used the bearded hipster as a comparison, suggesting that with forward thinking we are just now noticing how cool the data lake can be.

“We need to operationalize the data lake to become a strategic corporate asset,” stated Gallivan. He believes that there is a need to blend easily and enable business units to use this data on demand so that IT can take advantage of tools to support the next-generation view of the Big Data lake.

Pentaho is serving two masters, Gallivan explained. “We are helping IT to build and provide governance, and the other master is the line of business. We are enabling the line of business to have self-services with auto ETL (extract, transform, load), auto data modeling and auto discovery.”

Who is making money on Big Data?

Gallivan broke down some Pentaho use cases driving innovation and cost savings for the consumer. The first client use case involved telematics that use IMS computers in vehicles to provide insurance companies with driver data. This provides usage-based insurance rates and allows insurance providers to offer better discounts based on an actual driving records.

With another example of improving efficiency for the consumer, Gallivan pointed to its client OPOWER, Inc., which provides personalized analytics on energy usage to the consumer to offer insight into energy consumption. Currently, there are 25 companies offering this information to 50 million consumers.

Businesses are also using Pentaho technology to provide operational productivity. C.A.T., Inc., a transportation company, is applying IoT and predictive analysis to shipping. It is able to analyze cargo ships by tracking operating systems and blending them with GPS to use predictive capabilities to see if a ship’s system will fail.

Compliance and fraud detection in the stock market

Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Inc. (FINRA), an independent regulatory body, with the sole purpose of detecting fraud in the securities industry, captures 75 billion events per day. Gallivan boasted that the teams at FINRA are “great innovators” that analyze this data for fraud trends and abnormalities.

NASDAQ, Inc. (NASDAQ), a leading provider of trade surveillance technology to marketplaces, regulators and market participants, is also a Pentaho client running in the cloud and turning data into analytics to allow its members to be effective traders.

Mission and obligation going forward

Gallivan ended his talk by describing how Pentaho is the heat shield on next-gen technology. He explained, “All technology is being run through open source in lab show to make our products faster and better and then harden them for the enterprise.”

He said the company would continue to drive innovation in the Big Data ecosystem. He also mentioned that Hitachi is helping the company to sharpen its focus with ongoing initiatives.

New product roadmap

Next up, Christopher Dziekan, EVP and chief product officer for Pentaho, took to the stage to present the details of what the company now offers. Keeping in line with Gallivan, Dziekan said, “Our mission was to move the dial to simplicity and make our products enterprise ready.”

5.3-5.4 lead to 6.0

Dziekan explained that he had two teams at work, one working on the new functionality in the 5.3 and 5.4 updates to the Pentaho’s products, which hardened the Big Data by adding functionality with a blend of self-services using guardrails. Some of the features included Dynamic ETL, blend and publish, and a model with less IT touchpoints. The result is streamlined data refinery, tailored APIs and embedded analytics that allow customization.

According to Dziekan, “The 5.4 release moved into a cloudy space, using cloud for improved process and scale.”

Available today

Dziekan then announced that the other team was focusing on the new release, Pentaho 6.0 upgrade, which is available to customers today. He stressed that the team painstakingly devised a release that would enable the customer to upgrade without losing the data models they already had in place.

This release has better system performance with enhanced push down. Dziekan credited the company’s partnership with Melissa Data Corp. for assisting with putting the right controls in place and upgrading the data. The features of 6.0 comprise reusable clusters, a new GUI and better security structure.

The chief goal of the project, according to Dziekan, is lifecycle management. He said, “When customers want to upgrade, we don’t want to break what you have already built.” Our team was ruthless when it came to not accepting changes in the code that would not break your experiences.”

A focus on enabling enterprise ease

Dziekan specified how Pentaho would move forward with, “customizable installs, content lifecycle to add granularity, a continued investment to make sure we are embeddable, geo-mapping APIs to add your own visualizations. Upgrades and migrations matter and shall not break.”

Closing out, Dziekan also credited Hitachi for providing Pentaho with the ability to scale and reach new places without distracting Pentaho from its customer focus.

Watch the Keynote video 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.

Photos by SiliconANGLE