Pentaho, a company that makes big data insight more accessible to the business user, released a new version of its flagship solution. Pentaho Business Analytics 4.5 works as a layer between Hadoop and the end user, with a new set of features.

On the user end, Business Analytics expands on readability with the addition of geo mapping, heat grids and two new chart types, in addition to what it calls interactive visual analysis. A user can, for example, zoom in on a particular element in a bubble graph. Pentaho says the new functionality works across all forms of visualization the platform has to offer.

In addition, there some simplified reporting options thrown into the mix, and in-memory cache performance has also been optimized.

“The new visualization features in Pentaho Business Analytics 4.5 such as heat grids and lasso filtering will greatly enhance our marketing analytics solutions and are sure to impress our end users,” said Michael Winner, Vice President, Consulting Services, Numeric Analytics. “Because Pentaho has a unified environment for data integration and visualization tools, it is much easier and quicker to deliver useful business analytics solutions…”

The backend improvements that version 4.5 introduces are just as significant as the first portion of the update. Deployment across Hadoop clusters has been simplified with a Debian package management system for MapR (MapReduce wasn’t left out either–a new visual designer has been included for the framework).  On top of that, support has been expanded to include the Cassandra, DataStax and MongoDB databases, and some security components.

Pentaho certainly tried to cover as much as possible in this latest release. And for good reason – competition is increasing as companies pursue more efficient ways of connecting their data with the decisions makers in the field. Vendors like Attivio are making serious progress in this area as well.