Today Pentaho, a BI software maker, announced that it’s working on a joint solution with DataStax, the first commercial distributor of the Cassandra Hadoop connector. The main concept is to fuse Pentaho’s visualization and overall emphasis on UI simplification with DataStax’s open-source, NoSQL goodness.

The Pentaho Kettle integration will make it easier for users of both DataStax Enterprise and DataStax Community to manage their data’s entire lifecycle, according to the two companies. Data scientists can improve their productivity thanks to automated reports and consolidation via dashboards, along with the ability to connect to third party data streams. This is the official the summary of what Pentaho and DataStax had in mind when conceiving their partnership:

“By integrating DataStax, which is capable of spanning multiple datacenters with Pentaho Kettle, Cassandra-based solutions are now easier to use, more dependable and significantly faster to develop, extending how and where Cassandra can be used by enterprises. By integrating with Pentaho Kettle, DataStax is woven more tightly into the broader fabric of big data and traditional data sources.”

At least on paper, this seems like a rather good move. The exec who likely – and by default – played one of the biggest roles in realizing this vision is Quentin Gallivan, the current CEO of Pentaho appointed in October last year. Gallivan has a rather impressive resume that covers tenures at a number of tech firms, such as VeriSign and a web startup that was eventually acquired by Google.

On to DataStax. The company is still a relatively young one, and launched its flagship offering back in September. There are some very clear hopes to try and replicate the success Hadoop distributors such as Cloudera have seen, only with a somewhat more roundabout approach.