Today, Monday, 2013 April 22, Pentaho completed the acquisition of long-time partner, Webdetails.
Pentaho offers one of the most complete data management and analytics suites available both as an open source solution, its Community Edition, and as an Enterprise Edition:
- included target database [HSQL or MySQL], with the ability to use any RDBMS,
- extract, transform and load servers and clients, KETTLE, Carte, Pan and Spoon,
- online analytical processing server, Mondrian,
- metadata management,
- report development,
- schema development,
- dashboard development,
- data mining, WEKA,
- and a BI server to tie it all together.
Webdetails is a 20-person strong consultancy based in Portugal, founded by Pedro Alves, focused on building Pentaho solutions for its customers, and on data visualization. In addition to the consulting work, Webdetails has become the major committer for the open source Community Development Framework project, originally developed by Ingo Klose. In the course of their work, as inspired by the muse of customer needs, Webdetails has grown the original CDF project into a full suite of OSS data visualization and dashboard projects, CTools. Over the past year, the talented web details user experience teams, seems to have put out a new CTool almost monthly.
- CDF - community dashboard framework
- CDE - community dashboard editor
- CBF - community build framework
- CDA - community data access
- CCC - community chart components
- CST - community startup tabs
- CGG - community graphics generator
- CDC - community distributed cache
- CDB - community data browser
- CDG - community data generator
- CDV - community data validation
Pedro Alves is an extremely well-respected member of the Pentaho community, leading community events and training, appearing often in the forums and IRC, and staying connected through Twitter and Skype. Recently, Pedro was highly active in helping to create the Pentaho Marketplace, which provides direct access from the BI Server web interface for users, to a series of plug-ins for the BI Server, including CTools, and other community and third-party projects.
I have the pleasure of knowing Pedro, and several other of the Webdetails and Pentaho teams. This week I was able to speak with Pedro, as well as Davy Nys, Vice President, EMEA & APAC at Pentaho, and Doug Moran, one of Pentaho's Founders.
Pedro doesn't feel that the acquisition will change Webdetails, in that both the UX and consulting teams will continue as before. However, both community and enterprise users of Pentaho will feel the impact of both teams, as the lessons learned from Webdetails consulting projects are implemented by the UX team, not only in the Dashboards and data visualizations tools, but also, per Davy, in the overall UX throughout all the Pentaho products. Having worked with Pentaho tools as a practitioner in the past, I know that business users will appreciate this as Pentaho becomes both easier and more pleasant to use. The data scientists will also appreciate more and better tools to draw the story out of the data, and present it to the subject matter experts and business leaders in an Agile fashion.
As Pedro mentioned, most things won't change, such as the fact that CDF is the underpinning of all of Pentaho Dashboards, or the pace of development of new CTools. Several are currently underway. One that I can mention grew out of a request by the Mozilla Foundation, for a file and data browser for the Hadoop distributed file system [HDFS] that would be as easy as the file browser in any modern operating system. The result is CVB - community VFS browser. One thing that will change is that more of the CTools will make their way into the main branch of the EE product as they reach the appropriate state of maturity and stability.
Pedro has many plans for CTools, and for facilitating data visualization through Pentaho. But in addition to continuing his role as the general manager of Webdetails, and Chief Architect of CTools, Pedro will also be assuming the role of Senior Vice President of Community for Pentaho. As a long time friend of the Pentaho community myself, I have to say that there couldn't be a better choice.
One of Pentaho's Founders, Doug Moran, was the "Community Guy", who stayed in this role until the start of 2011, following the original community guy, Gretchen Moran. Doug's philosophy is that any open source community needs to stand on its own to be organic and strong. The Pentaho community is one of the strongest in the OSS DMA space, and as a result, Doug felt comfortable focusing elsewhere, and assumed management of all of Pentaho's "big data" products and Instaview initiatives. As SVP of Community, Pedro will be mostly focused within the company to integrate the community internally and help drive the corporate strategy for community. He'll continue to participate in the community, but as the Pentaho BeeKeeper model, developed by Pentaho CTO & Chief Geek, James Dixon, his main concern will be to assure that there is a rich environment for community innovation. As part of that, Pedro will also be actively pursuing ways to grow and leverage the Pentaho Marketplace. Doug also pointed out that the Pentaho community is also hugely valuable for QA and as a training ground for the best Pentaho developers. This is sure to continue with Pedro in his new role. Doug and Pedro have worked together since the early days of Pentaho, when Pedro decided to quit his job, and, with his wife, create a company devoted to professional services for Pentaho projects and products. This strong relationship between the original Community Guy and the new SVP of Community can only help to make an already strong community even better and more creative.
Davy pointed out to me that there has been an increase in customer demand for Dashboards that were in essence, apps within Pentaho. This might happen through a plan that Pedro has to make it very easy to create such dashboard-based apps without any programming ability, and then publish them to the Marketplace. This planned community plugin kick-starter [CPK] will use CDE to create the front-end, and the Pentaho Data Integration software, KETTLE and Spoon, for the backend logic. I believe that both internal and external consultants, integrating Pentaho into an organization's decision making process, will find this ability exciting, as many of these system integrators are not Java developers. The ability to push such apps to the Marketplace will also be embraced by both CE and EE users, as most customers are excited by the idea of openly sharing their solutions, and enjoy the resulting community recognition.
As the innovations related to the big data and data science movements become more important, Davy told me that Pentaho has seen great interest in four areas:
- EDW optimization,
- exploratory analytics,
- machine learning [WEKA, mahout & R], and
- leveraging Hadoop to scale.
Webdetails fits very well into creating a finer exploratory analytics experience for the customers, and will make Pentaho a superior choice for big data. Combined with Instaview, and with the proper roadmap, it may even push Pentaho into the new Data Grok market, not only helping users answer the questions they have, but actually pointing out the questions that the data set can answer, even if the user didn't think of it.
Both CE and EE users and customers of Pentaho should welcome this acquisition, and look forward to the better UX and data visualization. Most importantly, they should plan on how they can contribute to, and benefit from the Pentaho Marketplace, as it becomes an important part of the Pentaho ecosystem.
Other Resources:
- Pedro Alves on Business Intelligence: "A new challenge - Webdetails Joins Pentaho"
- Pentaho page about announcement: Bringing the art of the possible to life
- Webdetails page about the announcement: The future of business analytics changes today
- Pentaho Blog: Webdetails and the Art of the Possible
- Press Release English: Pentaho Acquires Dashboard and UI Specialist Partner Webdetails
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