Enabling customers to ride the waves of tech trends is a big part of Pentaho Corporation’s business approach, said the tech company’s Vice President of Product and Solutions Marketing, Donna Prlich, during a live interview on theCUBE. With a new technology emerging every day, Prlich explained, it’s essential for customers to be flexible without sacrificing their ability to “get value from Big Data.”

Since Pentaho “Came out of open source,” Prlich related, they have an “adaptive big data layer” that allows them to natively support a variety of Hadoop distributions. This interface, she said, makes it simple for customers to switch. A “pluggable platform” gives customers choice in a world where it’s “Hortonworks today, Cloudera tomorrow.”

This approach also helps Pentaho ensure that they don’t disrupt customer infrastructure, Prlich said. This assist the company to blend data from a variety of sources — whether it’s data from legacy systems or unstructured machine data.

Following the Data

Pentaho has focused on helping customers figure out how to refine, blend, and then deliver data sets to those who need them. Their Streamlined Data Refinery, a Hadoop-powered business information hub designed to help visualize large data sets, allows customers to “follow the process of data ingestion into Hadoop,” then “deliver it to end users,” according to Prlich. She also pointed to Pentaho’s front end tools that use automation to make customers’ lives easier with features like auto-modeling and auto-publishing. It brings “data and analytics together,” she said, much as it brings together “IT and the Business.”

Making Integration Easier

Two factors, said Prlich, have contributed to making integration easier:

1. “On the developer side,” she remarked, “the tools have gotten better. We’ve actually optimized ours for big data sources, which is a whole other world of data sources to deal with.”

2. Armed with better tools, Pentaho has been able to “close the loop between IT and the business” with the ability to run queries quickly and easily via a simple user interface. “The information behind it could be really complex,” she said, “but the user would never know.”

These types of innovations are driven by advances made possible by open source software, but also by demand on the consumer end. In conversations with CTOs, Prlich remarked that there’s a drive to make things run faster and more efficiently. Board room conversations are getting more technical even as user interfaces are becoming more streamlined. “That’s the cool thing about where we are,” Prlich said, “it’s transformational.”

Watch the full interview with Donna Prlich below, and be sure to check out even more coverage from Siliconangle and theCUBE at #BigDataSV.