Most analytics solution providers now place open source at the heart of their go-to-market approach. But when pioneering open-source analytics vendor Pentaho was formed more than a decade ago, it was still a novel, untested business model.

When Hitachi Data Systems acquired Pentaho two years ago, the complementary advantages from combining their respective portfolios were clear to all observers. Traditionally, HDS had primarily offered data storage and converged data-center infrastructure solutions for the midmarket.

For its part, Pentaho had built on its open-source foundation to become a leading provider of enterprise-grade big data, business intelligence, predictive analytics and data integration solutions. In addition to providing licensed software for enterprise deployment, Pentaho had built a substantial revenue base on the software as a service basis.

At the time they joined forces, it was clear that the converged HDS/Pentaho was going to address growing opportunities in providing advanced analytics edge-computing environments, most notably the “internet of things.” When its Tokyo-based corporate parent last year created a separate unit, Hitachi Insight Group, to focus on IoT opportunities, it was obvious that the HDS and Pentaho teams would play a pivotal role in the company’s concerted push into industrial IoT and other edge analytics markets.

Considering all this, it was no great surprise when the company formed a new wholly owned subsidiary last month from what had been these three distinct product teams. This week in Orlando, the converged product group, Hitachi Vantara, hosted the latest annual Pentaho World. On the heels of Hitachi Vantara’s recent IoT-focused Hitachi NEXT event, Pentaho World has demonstrated that this product group is keenly focused on opportunities in key IoT verticals — most notably, financial services, insurance, government, manufacturing, telecommunications and transportation. As can be seen from range of customers and partner interviews on theCube at Pentaho World 2017, Hitachi Vantara has significant momentum in its go-to-market strategy of driving machine learning and other data-driven technologies to the edge.

Hitachi Vantara counts more than 10,000 customers and an ecosystem of more than 2,000 partners, many of whom were in attendance this week at Pentaho World. Edge analytics is very much a customer-facing priority for many of them. As Brian Householder, the group’s president and chief operating officer, said in his interview on theCUBE, Hitachi Vantara’s mission is “how do we help our customers deliver what we call ‘edge to outcomes,’ which is really wherever your data gets created in whatever environment it happens to be…. We can then help you deliver the outcome that you actually need for your business.”

The top news from this week’s conference was the announcement of Pentaho 8.0, which brings its open-source bonafides into the the very IoT-focused world of streaming analytics. Due for general availability in November, Pentaho 8.0 will fully connect to real-time stream processing in Apache Spark or Apache Kafka, in addition to Pentaho’s own streaming engine. Without requiring rewrites to data integration logic, it will also enable information technology managers to easily bring up additional distributed nodes in real-time, spread simultaneous workloads across all available computation resources, and match workloads with the most appropriate processing engine. As stated on theCUBE by Donna Prlich, Hitachi Vantara’s chief Pentaho product officer:

“With 8.0 it’s a perfect spot for us to be in, because as we look at IoT and the amount of data that’s being generated and then the need to address streaming data … this is a great way for us to pull in a lot of the capabilities needed to go after those types of opportunities and solve those kinds of challenges. So the first one is really all about how can we connect better to streaming data and… it’s Spark streaming, it’s connecting to Kafka streams, it’s connecting to the Knox gateway, all things that are about streaming data. … [With the] adaptive execution layer, [it’s] the idea that you could choose the execution layer or the execution engine you want based on the processing you need so you can choose the [Pentaho Data Integration] engine you can choose Spark…. Hopefully over time we’re going to see other engines emerge, so we made that easier [to incorporate].”

For an in-depth drill-down, commentary and context on all this, check out videos from Pentaho World 2017. Here are a few highlights:

• Day One keynote
• Day one intro on theCUBE
• Day one wrap on theCUBE
• Brian Householder, president and chief operating officer, Hitachi Vantara
• Donna Prlich, chief Pentaho product officer, Hitachi Vantara
• Anthony DeShazor, senior vice president, customer success and chief solution architect, Hitachi Vantara

And for good measure, here’s a recent post in which I recap what Hitachi Vantara’s Chuck Yarbrough discussed with me and John Furrier on theCUBE at the recent BigData NYC event.

Image: Hitachi Vantara