The Hitachi-Pentaho merger has seen a number of benefits for both organizations as they tackle big data market opportunities. Primarily, the integration has enabled improved support for new and existing customers with the backing of its newly formed venture, Hitachi Vantara.

“Pentaho has been great for us just in terms of being able to be really flexible with our data,” said Nathan Hart (pictured), development manager at automotive dealer lender NextGear Capital Inc. and a longtime Pentaho customer. NextGear leverages Pentaho to enhance data processing and storage at the company. And as the company moves away from its “monolithic database” currently used for data storage into a more streamlined system, Pentaho provides a supportive, user-friendly path, according to Hart.

“In Pentaho we can easily branch off and go to the monolithic database, but also talk to another service that is going to replace it … and [have] adaptability around those changes,” he said.

Hart spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the PentahoWorld event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed NextGear Capital’s expanding data needs, as well as how Hitachi Vantara and Pentaho 8.0 are supporting its growth. (* Disclosure below.)

Out with the old, in with 8.0

Hart and his team have remained satisfied Pentaho customers through the Hitachi acquisition, primarily because of the prebuilt tools that come ready-to-use with the service. “It’s a massive library far greater than most of the competition that we looked at, and … it’s built on this great Java platform,” he said.

Although the team did initially experience a learning curve with the software, its volume of tools and resources has resulted in huge value for NextGear. “It really sped up our development,” Hart said.

Looking ahead, NextGear Capital is striving to interact more natively with microservices and streamline work within one singular ecosystem. Hart is encouraged by what Hitachi Vantara and Pentaho’s latest 8.0 release have to offer the company and its customers.

“I can definitely already see a couple use cases where we can improve existing jobs with some of the new streaming features that they have,” Hart said about Pentaho 8.0.

Improving jobs is top of mind for Hart, as well as developers in every industry, in the wake of tech’s current talent shortage. However, Hart is reassured that the NextGear Capital team will continue to thrive with incoming university talent.

“They’re a lot further along than I was when I came out of school. … They can step in and already understand a lot of these complex architectures that we’re dealing with and just hit the ground running,” Hart concluded.

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