A pending acquisition by Hitachi Data Systems isn’t slowing the pace of development at Pentaho Corp., which is opening its flagship analytics platform to Amazon Redshift and Cloudera, Inc.’s Impala in release 5.3 announced today.

The open-source provider of reporting, analysis, dashboard, data mining and workflow software is continuing to broaden its integration with third-party tools in an effort to make its dashboard the default destination for end-users to conduct business analysis. Pentaho’s software includes a dedicated integration layer for connections to third-party systems. Redshift and Impala were previously supported through SQL queries but not through direct data integration.

Release 5.3 continues the evolution of what Pentaho calls “Streamlined Data Refinery,” a concept that Chief Product Officer Chris Dziekan, likened to “ETL [extract, transform, load] on demand. We have a set of parameters that know what data is needed how to fetch it, what predictive models to apply and how to land the data in Hadoop on Amazon,” Dziekan said. The process supports both structured and unstructured data in a single query. Pentaho also connects to a wide variety of Hadoop and other data sources either natively or through connectors.

Pentaho aims to make it easy for customers to embed analytics into production applications such as call center management so that customer service representatives can run analytics on customers while they’re still on the phone. Release 5.3 includes a set of published application program interfaces “that let people define exactly how they want data extracted and displayed,” Dziekan said. “You don’t have to step out of your day job to get analytics.” The software can also render results into popular analytics reporting tools from the likes of Tableau Software, Inc., IBM Cognos and SAP SE’s Business Objects.

The goal, Dziekan explained, is to achieve a balance between the bottleneck of IT-intensive data extraction and the chaos of letting users specify their own data needs. “We want to see the pendulum in the middle with what we call ‘governed data delivery,’” he said. “That enables business users to get the information when they need it.”