Orlando, FL, June 22, 2011 —- Pentaho, a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced a major advancement in user-driven BI with the release of Pentaho BI 4 Enterprise Edition. This major release gives power to the user with new interactive reporting, rich data discovery capabilities, and a completely redesigned user interface. Pentaho now delivers dramatic progress in the ability for business users to access, report, and analyze data from more sources, more easily, and quicker than ever before.

Chief among these new features is the new interactive, Web-based report designer, which provides intuitive yet powerful report building for non-technical business users to serve their own reporting requirements without relying on IT. This builds upon Pentaho’s strong operational reporting capabilities, and complements Pentaho’s comprehensive data analysis, data integration, and data mining capabilities, all with the benefit of low-cost, subscription-based pricing.

Pentaho BI 4 includes a new visual interface designed to make BI more appealing and consumable by all users from developers, to power users, to non-technical business users. The new visual interface is also re-designed for ease of customization, so that direct customers and OEM partners can easily re-skin the application to conform to their own standards or existing applications.

The non-technical business user will be able to:

Dynamically interact with saved reports by applying sorting, filtering, groupings and summary totals on the fly;

Easily create highly formatted, interactive reports with zero training and no dependence on IT or power users;

Incorporate interactive reports into Pentaho Dashboards with the ability to tie to common dashboard controls;

Use the enhanced visual interface design to more easily interact with the application.

The power-user / business analyst will be able to:

Enhance data discovery with new multi-chart visualization capabilities;

Take advantage of interactive drillable charts to drill up and down through data hierarchies and link visualizations to related content;

Improve interactivity with dashboards via addition of dashboard-level filters and ability to link to additional content;

Create more informative and appealing charts through extended chart properties;

Effortlessly access more complex data sources leveraging Pentaho's best-in-class semantic metadata layer that allows business users to interactively report and analyze data in a self-service, web

The developer / administrator will be able to:

Access data from a wider range of Big Data stores including Hadoop and NoSQL;

Leverage new, tighter integration with high performance data marts and data warehouses including EMC Greenplum and Ingres Vectorwise;

Deploy data integration as a service, integrating data from multiple sources on-the-fly, and make it available as a virtualized federated data stream via Web Services, without needing to load the data into a data mart or warehouse;

Quickly and easily setup report bursting using a drag-and-drop workflow design tool, enabling mass distribution of personalized content to information consumers;

Use a web standards approach to easily customize user interfaces so that they conform to their organization's look-and-feel.

“With new tools like interactive reporting, richer interactive visualizations, and its new user interface, Pentaho BI 4 is making user-driven, self-service BI a reality. It enables business users to access, report, and analyze data from more sources more easily than ever before with the continuing benefit of the most affordable subscription-based pricing.”

-Richard Daley, CEO, Pentaho Corporation

“The recent Ventana Research Business Analytics Benchmark Research, ‘Benchmarking the Analysis of Data to Gain Business Insight,’ finds that ‘Usability stands out as the most important consideration in selecting business analytics regardless of company size, industry, individual role or functional area.’ The newest release of Pentaho BI addresses this business priority by facilitating better end-user interaction with data.”

-David Menninger, VP and Research Director, Ventana Research

About Pentaho Corporation

Pentaho is reinventing business intelligence by introducing an agile approach that makes it faster, simpler and more cost effective to create reports, dashboards and analytics. For a free evaluation download Pentaho BI at www.pentaho.com/download.