Today was our first German Customer Meeting that Bruno initiated and it took place at one of our customer locations @Wirecard AG (many thanks!).

A nice (and squeezed…) agenda and around 20 attendees discussed the presented customer solutions, their experiences and what Pentaho can do better, but also: what really works well and this is a lot and proven in medium and large deployments. Here are some examples in addition to „normal“ BI:

• Processing 500 thousand transactions per day (credit card and alternative payment methods)
• Merchant deposit monitoring including fraud detection of merchants (!)
• Application and data row level role based security in a multi-tenant solution using special role management via a Mondrian plug-in
• Highly performant solutions with load balancing servers and high availability (99.95%), one of them with a failover with two complete separate locations
• Pentaho integrates very well in existing IT infrastructures
• Event triggered ETL by an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) / SOA architecture: JBoss ESB triggers PDI Jobs for application integration (JMS, File, HTTP, SMTP, FTP etc.). At this time via the Kettle API but it is planned to use Kettle Web-Services
• PDI is used as a data source for reporting, just a nice EAI use case
• Pentaho is integrated into JBoss EAP (the customer version of JBoss AS, everything in this platform is secured by default)
• 3 of the attendees are using Infobright
• Report bursting was accomplished by 3 different methods: 1) using xActions, 2) using ant scripts, 3) using Kettle

Major discussed improvements:

• More integrated and consistent security throughout all products (it’s possible but special requirements are tricky to implement)
• Report bursting with scheduling should be more standardized and user friendly
• Since Pentaho can be extended and embedded very well via extension APIs, the upgrade to next versions should be more seamless by special dedicated documentation for OEM and stable API extension points [this will be addressed in the road map by the SDK]
• Upgrade process: upgrade tools would be a huge benefit for supporting it, also when some releases were not installed (e.g. jump from 3.x to 4.1 instead of 4.0)

As part of the Pentaho Product Management team, I presented the product road map and gave some quick insights in the Kettle Star Modeler.

I look forward to the next event of this type for knowledge sharing between Pentaho customers and users. We found already one volunteer (Guy) to take it from here 🙂

BTW: This event was only in German language (at this time!) and thanks again to Wirecard, Rob & Bruno for organizing this and to the attendees for their presentations and active participation!

Here are some impressions….