Data Integration Made Easy: A Guide to Pentaho

Modern problems require modern solutions. We all must have heard this saying at some point in life. But, what does it mean now that the market is more competitive than ever, we have a pandemic on top of the world and most importantly, there is a huge shift towards a digital economy? With the problems of new-age desperately upon us, economies have to find a way to survive while industries have to look for more digital-based options.

Since physical barriers continue to remain and we still don’t step out into the open like before, more and more industries are turning digital. Even though there was already a surge towards digitization across the world, the acceleration has come owing to the pandemic of COVID 19.

Growing Digital Presence, Growing Data

As a result of this, businesses are in an ever-increasing rush to establish their presence on multiple platforms. Be it website, stores, marketplaces, social media, or social media marketplaces, it’s easy to observe how the scenario is changing rapidly. But, a mere presence on multiple platforms isn’t going to help companies bounce back to the normal or leverage the huge digital force.

To sail on the waves of digitization, businesses will have to analyze and monitor their presence and respond to the market proactively. In other words, the demands of the customer have to be prioritized. The question is how to make this come true?

As a business, you make promises to your customers. These are delivered through the means of your product and services. But, t understand whether these promises were delivered up to the expectations of the customer, you have to look at the data. Data helps shed light on the fact of customer responses, preferences, likings, and disliking’s among other things. In other words, data is the mine businesses must dig to find out to find everything there is to excel in the current market scenario.

The real challenge is assimilating all the data in the world and deriving any kind of meaning out of it. A few years ago, this would have been a nearly impossible task, even with multiple resources and costs being dedicated to the cause. But today, this is a reality, with more than a few tools and platforms existing to ease the task.

The Age of Business Intelligence – Data Integration

One such platform is Pentaho Data Integration, which is easing the task as well as pushing businesses towards their goal of business intelligence. While the problem of combining data across different platforms is real, Pentaho offers a seamless way out of it. Its ETL core helps uncomplicate tasks and boost business like never before.

Let’s understand it this way when your business is on multiple platforms, every source is generating data. Moreover, each of these platforms will have their share of formats, visualizations, reporting style, and more. The issue is how to bring them all one platform. After all, it’s your business everywhere and you have to analyze it as a single entity.

Pentaho uses the principle of Extract, Transform, and Load to solve this complicated task. Then it uses its advanced features to answer more complicated questions regarding the data. More to this, it also enables enterprises to present data in the format and visualization they find best for their organization.

Extract

The first step of compiling all the data across multiple platforms is to extract it. The process of extraction involves picking data from multiple sources. These sources can be a legacy system, customer relationship management tools, mobile devices and applications, data storage platforms, analytics tools, various sales, and marketing tools among others.

Transform

The next step is to take this extracted data towards transformation. Data transformation is one of the lengthiest steps of the process and one of the most important ones. This helps in bringing the data together. In other words, it refers to applying a set of rules and regulations to a piece of data and turning it to a standard format. Several steps involved in transformation include cleansing of data, standardization, removing any redundancies, verifying it, sorting it along with applying some rules to improve the quality of data as desired by the organization.

Load

The final step of the process of loading of data. This is the part where the transformed data is finally fed into a data warehouse or data lake. Pentaho transfers this data incrementally over a cloud-based or on-site reservoir, where it can be used for further use. With the advancement in technology and emerging demands, more and more organizations are using cloud-based data warehouses. This helps in easier collaboration, ease of accessibility, and others.

Custom Visualization

Custom visualization comes into play once the data is loaded on the data warehouse. Pentaho helps organizations create visualizations for multiple teams and departments. Since your work might revolve around vigorous collaboration, it is imperative to have the visualization that different teams can understand. Moreover, as per different goals and key performance indicators, the visualization of data must be changed. This helps in finding the right information clearly, without any hassles.

Pentaho is a gem when it comes to business intelligence. It integrates your data into one single platform seamlessly, without asking for an intensive budget or resource. Moreover, it gives flexibility to businesses to run their algorithms for simplifies data processing and execution of any higher-level tasks that might be required.