Before Lumada, we had a variety of homegrown solutions. Most of it was centered on our warehouse management system because that was our primary focus. There were also reports within the point of sale system, and the two never crossed paths. Now they're integrated. There was also an analysis tool they had before I came on board. I can't remember the name of it. The company had something, but it didn't do what they thought it would do, and the project fizzled.

Part of the problem was that they didn't have somebody in-house who understood business intelligence until they brought me on. They were very operationally focused before that. The management was like, "We need more insight into what we're doing and how we're doing it." That was phase two of the big data warehouse push. The management here is relatively conservative in that regard, so they're somewhat slow to say, "Hey. We need to do something along these lines." But when they decide to go, get out of the way because here we come.

I used a different tool at my previous job called Informatica. Lumada has less of a learning curve for deployment. Lumada was similar enough to Informatica that it's like, "Okay. This makes sense," but there were a few differences. Once I figured out the difference, it made a lot of sense to me. The entire chain of steps Lumada allows you to do is intuitive.

Informatica was a lot more tedious to use. You had to hook every column up from its source to its target. With Lumada, it's the name that matters and its position. It made aspects a whole lot easier and less tedious. Every so often, it bites me in the butt. If I get a column out of order, it'll let me know I did something wrong. But it's much less error-prone because I don't have to hook every column up from its source to its target anymore. With Informatica, there were times where I spent 20 minutes just sitting there trying not to drool on myself. It was terrible. 

We used Talend, which is a Java-based solution and is made for people with proficiency in Java. The entire analytics ecosystem is transitioning to more flexible runtimes, including Python and other languages. Java was not ideal for our data analytics journey.

Right now, we are using NiFi, a tool in the cloud ecosystem that has a similar drag-and-drop interface, but it's embedded in the ADU framework. We're also using another drag-and-drop tool on AWS, but not AWS Glue Studio. 

I have a little bit of experience with AWS Glue. Its advantage is that it is tied natively into the AWS PySpark processing. Its disadvantage is that it writes some really difficult-to-maintain lines of code for all of its transformations, which might work fine if you have just a dozen or so transformations, but if you have a lot of transformations going on, it can be quite difficult to maintain.

We've also got quite a lot of experience working with SSIS. I much prefer Pentaho to SSIS. The SSIS ties you rigidly to your data flow structure that exists at design time, whereas Pentaho is very flexible. If, for instance, you wanted to move 15 columns to another table, in SSIS, you'd have to configure that with your 15 columns. If a 16th column appears, it would break that flow. With Pentaho, without amending your ETL, you can just amend your end data set to accept the 16th column, and it would just allow it to flow through. This and the fact that the transformation isn't tied down at the design time make it much more flexible than SSIS.

In terms of component reuse, other ETL tools are not nearly as good at being able to just pick up a transformation or a sub-transformation and drop it into your pipelines. You do tend to keep rewriting things again and again to get the same functionality.

At my current firm, we weren't using anything in this team. I just came in, and I knew I wanted to use this product. I had used it quite heavily at my previous firm, and it was just very easy. Even the folks who did not have prior coding experience or data ETL experience could fairly quickly learn its semantics or the ways to work with it. So, I figured that it would be a great product to push forward.

Other teams in my firm were using low-code or no-code solutions, but I just can't stand their interfaces. It's rather limited in terms of even viewing what's on the screen and what you have. I appreciate the way you can debug very quickly within PDI.

We are very satisfied with our decision to purchase Hitachi's product. Previously, we were using another ETL service that had a number of limitations. It was not a modern ETL service at all. For anything, we had to rely on another third-party software. Then, with Hitachi Lumada, we don't have to do that. In that way, we are really satisfied with the orchestration or cloud-native steps that they offer. We are really happy on those fronts.

We were using something called Actian Services, which had less features and it ended up costing more than the enterprise edition of Pentaho.

We could not do a number of things on Actian. For instance, we were unable to call other APIs or connect to an S3 bucket. It was not a very modern solution. Whereas, with Pentaho, we could do all these things as well as have great marketplaces where we could find various modules and third-party plugins. Those features were simply not there in the other tool.

We didn't have another data integration product before Pentaho.

I didn't use any other solution previously. This was the only one.

I have used a lot of ETL data integrators, such as DataStage, Informatica, Talend, Matillion, Python, and even SQL. MicroStrategy, Qlik, and Tableau have instructional features, and I try to use a lot of tools to do instructions. 

In the past, I have worked with Talend, as well as SAP BO Data Services (BODS). However, that was with another company. This organization started with Pentaho and we are still using it.

We're moving to Airflow. The reason for the switch was mostly due to a problem when we are debugging. If you're familiar with the SQLs for integration services, the ETL tools from Microsoft and the debugging function are quite intuitive. You can exactly spot which transformation has failed or which transformation has an error. However, in the solution, from what my colleagues told me, it is hard to do that. When there is an error, we cannot directly spot where the error is coming from.

Airflow is quite customized and it's not as rigid as this product. We can deploy the simple ETL tools all the way to the machine learning systems on Airflow. Airflow mainly uses Python, which our team is quite familiar with. This solution is still handled by only two people out of 27 people on our team. Not enough people know it. 

I used SQL Server Integration Services, but I have much more experience with Pentaho. I have also worked with Apache NiFi but it is more focused on single data processes but I'm always working with batch processes and large data sets.

In this business, they initially began with this product and did not use another one beforehand. I have also worked on the cloud-level integration tool. 

At my first company, we used just Lumada. At my second company, we used a lot of QlikView, SQL, Python, and Lumada. At my third company, we used Python and SQL much more. I used Lumada just once at that company. At my new company, I don't use it at all. I just use Azure Data Factory and SQL.

With Pentaho, we finally have data pipelines. We didn't have solid data pipelines before. After the data pipelines became very solid, the team who created them became very popular in the company.

Everything was done manually in Excel. The main reason we went with Pentaho is that it's open-source.

We didn't have another tool. This is the only tool we have used to create the data warehouse between the two systems. When we started looking at solutions, this one was great because it was open source and Java-based, and it had a Community Edition. But we actually purchased the Enterprise Edition.

We came from the Microsoft environment to Hitachi, but that was 10 years back. We switched due to the licensing costs and because there wasn't really good support for the PostgreSQL database.

Now, I think the Microsoft environment isn't that bad, and there is also better support for open-source databases.

It has always been here. There was no solution like it until I got to the company.

Previously, we used to have something called QlikView, which is almost obsolete now. We had a lot of trouble with QlikView. Anytime processing was done, it would take a long time for those processed results to be loaded into QlikView's memory. This meant that there was a lot of time spent once an operation was done. Before users could see results or reports, it would take a couple of hours. We didn't want that lag. 

Pentaho offered an option not to have that lag. It did not have its own in-memory database, where everything had to be loaded. That was one of the big reasons why we wanted to switch away from QlikView, and Pentaho fit that need.

One of our customers was completely into the Microsoft core framework. We have to use SSIS because it's readily available with them, and is part of the system. We had to use it for five years. 

As mentioned, one of our teams has worked with Informatica in the past. In terms of integration, Informatica isn't more powerful, but more accurate in some aspects. The community is also quite strong.

Before Pentaho Kettle we used stored procedures, writing code and also Informatica. Informatica is a very good tool, but it is not open source so it is far more costly compared to Pentaho Kettle. From my perspective I don't see the difference, we can do almost everything with Pentaho Kettle and if we need a little extra we are tech guys, we solve it.

Of course that from the customer's perspective the cheaper the better, so if the customer has a smaller budget, they get more when using Pentaho Kettle open source. Even with the Pentaho Kettle enterprise edition.

It was already in place when I joined the company.

In the past I also worked with SAP BI. The main reason we switched to Pentaho was the cost of SAP. Because of the flexibility of Pentaho, I prefer to work with it.

I have used Informatica PowerCenter, which is an excellent solution. However, it´s not so easy to use as Pentaho kettle.

We've never really used another solution like this in our organization. This is the first.

Heavy ETL solutions were simply too expensive and the SSIS alternative is simply too hidious to consider. It took at least three times as much time to develop the same ETL proces with SSIS as compared to Pentaho. (And having to deal with the abject Microsoft ‘debugging’.

I switched from our previous solution for cost reasons.

We used Microstrategy, Cognos, and Business Objects. The pricing was the key driver, but also the open source licensing which made us think we would have been able to develop on our own improvements. This didn't happen because primarily of the few resources we effectively put on development.

We used MSBI and we switched to Pentaho Data Integration and it has saved us lot of money and time.