Although Pentaho Corp. was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems Corp. in 2015 and is now part of the newly formed Hitachi Vantara-branded family of companies, it still plans to maintain a distinct identity in the business intelligence and analytics space. That point was driven home with last week’s announcement during PentahoWorld of Pentaho 8.0, a data integration and mining suite.

The Pentaho release adds support for streaming and processing data through Apache Kafka and Spark. The newest version better positions Hitachi Vantara to meet anticipated demand for more compute resources that will be needed to power “internet of things” analytics at the edge.

“Hitachi Vantara for 8.0 is actually putting in the right incremental features for the market that lies ahead. In many ways that was a well-thought-out release for this particular event,” said James Kobielus (@jameskobielus, pictured, left), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the PentahoWorld event in Orlando, Florida.

He was joined by co-host Dave Vellante, (@dvellante, pictured, right), and they discussed streaming features of the 8.0 release, the need to build a developer community, and whether Hitachi Vantara will ultimately need a partner in the artificial intelligence space. (* Disclosure below.)

Analytics streaming on the rise

The open-source analytics streaming feature of the 8.0 data integration platform is what the analysts found especially attractive among Pentaho’s new offerings. “Streaming is coming into the mainstream, and data at rest platforms are starting to become marginalized in a lot of applications,” Kobielus explained. “They have the ability within 8.0 to better match real-time streaming workloads to execution engines in a distributed fabric.”

Hitachi Vantara is clearly betting that the internet of things and edge analytics arena will experience booming growth. The company’s Lumada internet of things platform will be a clear component of that strategy, but Hitachi Vantara may have some catching up to do, against competitors such as IBM or Cloudera Inc. in assembling a developer-friendly ecosystem. This could be a challenge, as the developer community can be tough to engage.

“The developer community is very fickle. They’re persnickety; they’re demanding; they’re super smart. They can be your best advocates, or they’ll just ignore you,” Vellante said.

By releasing streaming tools for edge-oriented environments, Hitachi Vantara is seeking to position itself more strongly in the competitive artificial intelligence landscape. Can the company be successful by itself? Or will it need help from another major player?

“AI right now belongs to AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM, to some degree,” Kobielus said. “[Hitachi Vantara] will probably have to hitch their wagon to one of those core cloud providers as a partner going forward to really prevail.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of PentahoWorld. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for PentahoWorld. Neither Hitachi Vantara, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE