As day two of PentahoWorld 2015 kicked off in Orlando, Dave Vellante and George Gilbert, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, review the most noteworthy customer stories they had heard so far.

Pentaho longevity

Noting that Pentaho Corp. has an extra year on Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), Gilbert believes that Pentaho has had time to build the longevity necessary to deliver critical information to the enterprise. “The value is in taking the data, blending it to provide analytics,” he said. This offers the customer beneficial insight into their business that AWS cannot yet provide.

Currently, many customers are using Pentaho on the AWS platform. Vellante posed the question, “How long will it take AWS to develop their own analytical tool?”

Gilbert sees it as the classic scenario where the platform tool application is playing along a rising tide. Eventually, the platform owner sees so many customers using an application on their platform, and they will want it to be part of their platform offering.

State of the ecosystem

Is Pentaho a tool or solution? Gilbert said this is the $64,000 question, and the company has to make a hard decision. “If you are a platform you don’t want to antagonize your software partners,” he said. The choice so far is between being a traditional business intelligence (BI) tool that vendors plug in, or taking specialized tools and integrating them between two points.

Vellante brought up Pentaho’s parent company Hitachi Data Systems Corp., describing it as an interesting angle, as it can provide a substantial distribution channel beyond what AWS has. Gilbert agreed, noting Amazon does not have the background to go after industrial use cases.

The industrial angle

Hitachi is also partners with General Electric Co. (GE). Gilbert stated that the relationship is complementary rather than competitive. “GE is committed to Cloud Foundry, and they need help with the analytical data product,” he said. Cloud Foundry is an open source platform provider that’s gained the support of several industry heavyweights.

However, GE has invested in Pivotal Software, Inc. (currently operating Cloud Foundry) and its next-generation Enterprise Platform-as-a-Service in order to create analytic services and solutions for the industrial Internet. Gilbert believes this will lead to the sale of monitoring services to improve machinery uptime and predict potential failures.

The flight of funding

Vellante admitted he always says that the ecosystem is overfunded. He related this to a previous interview on theCUBE with Peter Goldmacher, ‎vice president of strategy and market development at Aerospike, Inc., where he asked what happens when the funding dries out? Vellante used his analogy by saying, “The nose of the plane is tilting up, but companies are losing altitude and the nose of the plane will tip down.”

The panel consensus is that eventually bigger players will absorb the smaller companies and the pricing models will have to equalize.

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