With Big Data continuing an upward trend in the enterprise, decision makers are increasingly looking beyond traditional BI for operational visibility and competitive advantage. Not to be left in the dust, open source business intelligence firm Pentaho is shifting its focus to making information more consumable for end-users.

The company hit its first major analytics milestone in April with the acquisition of Webdetails, a Portuguese design studio that had contributed tools and dashboards to its ecosystem. The deal bought Pentaho a 20-strong team with the know-how to create rich visualizations and to integrate its software with emerging Big Data platforms.

Over the next few months, the firm introduced a distribution-agnostic Hadoop abstraction layer and partnered with Splunk to consolidate machine data analytics across relational and nonrelational databases. A few weeks later, Pentaho upgraded its Business Analytics solution with support for MongoDB, expanded data integration capabilities and new REST services for third party app developers.

“In 2013 we’ve seen customers and prospects moving beyond single Hadoop deployments to hybrid data systems that might include Hadoop for scalable storage, and MongoDB for high speed front-end analysis, STORM for real time analytics, and an engine like Cloudera Search or Apache Search for quick data look up. These customers turn to Pentaho because we provide a proven data integration and analytics layer that can work with all these technologies as data flows through the hybrid environment,” commented Richard Daley, Pentaho’s Chief Strategy Officer.

Marking a new chapter in its Big Data transition, the vendor recently announced that it has identified four priorities for the growing percentage of organizations using analytics in their production environments.

Pentaho lists data integration as the most sought after capability, with 57 percent of data-driven enterprises seeking to combine sales information with operational analytics. About 39 percent of companies are looking for a way to gain faster insights, while one in three is focused on unlocking legacy silos or providing “advanced” functionality for business users. The latter takes the shape of free form search, which promises to make running queries as easy as using Google.