Pentaho’s Platform Extensions are widely recognized for their value in embedded analytics, providing a robust framework for integrating Pentaho into larger solutions. However, their impact extends far beyond embedding.  These powerful extensions help enterprises simplify reporting, enforce access control, and manage multi-tenant environments with greater efficiency.

What Are Platform Extensions?

Pentaho’s Data Integration Enterprise Edition Platform Extensions provide advanced security, multi-tenancy, and data access control capabilities, helping enterprises reduce administrative overhead while strengthening governance. Whether you’re simplifying role-based reporting or streamlining departmental data access, these extensions offer a clear path forward for Enterprise Edition customers. Together, these six core components automate access, enforce data security, and simplify user management:

1. Automated Access Control (EXT-ContentAccess) – Enforces role-based access control across complex folder hierarchies, ensuring users only see relevant content.
2. Dynamic Data Connectivity (EXT-DynamicDataSources) – Dynamically directs users to the appropriate database based on their context at runtime, ensuring secure, role-aware data access.
3. Row-Level Security (EXT-DynamicDataFiltering) – Applies dynamic SQL logic at runtime, restricting data access based on session variables and predefined rules to ensure users see only relevant data without duplicating reports or manually editing SQL.
4. Smart Folder Management (EXT-HomeFolders) – Automatically creates home directories for applicable user roles, reducing manual setup and preventing unnecessary folders for read-only users.
5. Session-Based Security (EXT-SessionStartup) – Initializes the user session with essential security parameters, ensuring seamless integration with the other extensions and supporting single sign-on (SSO).
6. Flexible Authentication (EXT-SSO) – Provides enterprise-grade single sign-on (SSO) alongside standard authentication solutions (LDAP, SAML, CAS) while also accommodating custom authentication

 How Different Customers Leverage Platform Extensions

 For Embedded Analytics & Software Vendors

Organizations embedding rely on these enterprise extensions to:

• Provide a seamless user experience inside their software
• Automate role-based access and multi-tenant security
• Customize the look and feel to match the host application
• Reduce development effort by handling security and access dynamically

For Enterprises & Internal IT Teams

Enterprise customers can benefit from these extensions by:

• Integrating SSO to unify authentication across platforms
• Ensuring secure multi-tenant access without duplicating reports
• Automating role-based access and content filtering
• Dynamically enforcing security without manual SQL logic

Real-World Use Cases: How Platform Extensions Simplify Security and Access

• Departmental Data Access: Adjusts queries dynamically to reflect user roles and departments,  only authorized users see relevant data – without manual query modifications.
• Dynamic Role-Based Reporting: Enforces real-time access control and data filtering based on user attributes without duplicating reports or embedding static SQL logic.
• Simplified Content Access: Streamlines role-based folder and content management, reducing administrative workload while maintaining strict security.

Tying It All Together

Pentaho’s flexible architecture allows these extensions to seamlessly integrate into both embedded applications and enterprise environments. Whether you need to embed dashboards, dynamically filter data, or automate multi-tenant security, these extensions provide a scalable, secure solution.

For software vendors, this means embedding analytics that inherits host application security. For enterprises, it means enforcing access control without added complexity. The result? A fully integrated experience that preserves security and governance without disrupting the user workflow.

Licensing and Support

These extensions are supported by Pentaho Customer Success, ensuring seamless implementation and integration to meet your organization’s needs. To maximize value, we recommend a workshop to assess the best integration strategy for your organization.

If you want to explore how these extensions can simplify your reporting strategy or implement multi-tenant security, contact us at Pentaho Services to learn more.

The post Why Enterprises Use Pentaho Business Analytics EE first appeared on Pentaho.

Grupo EULEN, a leading provider of outsourced business services, has embraced this philosophy. Leveraging the Pentaho+ Platform to transform its data integration and analysis workflows, the company is more effectively tracking key financial and operational metrics, reducing time-to-insight, and enhancing decision-making processes. 

The Need for Increased Data Intelligence

Grupo EULEN serves more than 7,000 clients in over 11 countries across various sectors, including facilities management, security, social and health services, and HR solutions. The organization expanded its footprint through recent acquisitions in the United States, where it faces established multinational company competition.

“We are growing quickly, both in our home market of Spain and overseas. But in each of our service lines, we are competing against long-established multinational companies – so we need to remain as agile as possible to thrive,” said Ricardo Mardomingo, Chief Information Officer at Grupo EULEN.

Grupo EULEN established a Business Intelligence Competence Center to drive enhanced performance and operational efficiency. This internal team oversees data management and analytics projects aimed at creating efficiencies, reducing costs, and identifying new growth opportunities. Even with this dedicated team and focus, the company was finding it difficult to drive more value from its data due to outdated legacy tools and disparate systems.

Flexibility, Scalability, and Cost with Pentaho

Grupo EULEN partnered with innovAhead to redesign its data integration and reporting workflows by implementing the Pentaho+ Platform.

“We were impressed by the solution roadmap, with new functionality released regularly, and by the data integration capabilities of Pentaho,” said Mardomingo. “Pentaho offers excellent data integration and analytics capabilities without high licensing costs. When we looked at other data management solutions, we found complex pricing models and monthly fees. With Pentaho, we get the ideal combination of great functionality and cost-efficiency.” 

Using Pentaho Data Integration and Pentaho Business Analytics, Grupo EULEN now extracts financial, HR, and customer transaction data from its core business systems with minimal disruption to production systems. The analytics tools within Pentaho allow the creation of OLAP cubes and detailed reports that track key performance indicators (KPIs), which are then distributed to stakeholders. 

“In the past, we relied on limited legacy tools to create query-based reports,” noted Mardomingo, “Similarly, pulling data from the heterogenous systems used by different areas and business models was difficult. We wanted more sophisticated data integration and analytics solutions to deliver more value to the wider business and to reduce time-to-insight.” 

The implementation of Pentaho has significantly improved Grupo EULEN’s ability to make data-driven decisions. Approximately 1,000 employees now access information from the platform, including “Power Users” in the Business Intelligence Competence Center and business executives who rely on regular reports. 

Initially focused on core operations in Spain, the new business intelligence model is set to be rolled out globally. 

Time-to-Insights Creates Bottom Line Value

The ability to quickly assess the performance of its various service lines helps Grupo ELUEN identify issues and take proactive measures to optimize efficiency. For example, the company recently identified that its average time to collect customer payments was becoming excessive. By redesigning its accounts receivable processes, Grupo EULEN successfully reduced payment collection periods and improved cash flow. 

Juan Carlos Garcia, Leader of the Business Intelligence Team at innovAhead, states, “With Pentaho, we have greatly improved the time-to-insight, with users now able to access the data they need to track key business metrics near-instantly. Grupo EULEN is becoming a more agile company, as we can quickly pull information on the performance of EULEN’s different service lines and products, identify issues, and take proactive steps to reduce costs or optimize efficiency, and then measure the results.” 

As Grupo EULEN continues to evolve its business intelligence capabilities, the company plans to collaborate further with innovAhead and Pentaho around additional use cases.  

“We are interested in exploring other reference cases for Pentaho, to see how other clients are using the platform,” said Mardomingo. “In the next 12 months, we will complete another upgrade to access the latest-and-greatest functionality to support our data analysis strategy for 2025 and beyond.” 

Grupo EULEN’s commitment to leveraging data-driven insights through the Pentaho+ Platform enhances its data fitness and operational efficiency, positioning the company to thrive in an increasingly competitive landscape.  

Learn more about the power of the Pentaho+ Platform here or request a demo.  

The post Competing Globally Through Data Agility: Grupo EULEN Becomes Data-Fit with Pentaho first appeared on Pentaho.

CIOs and IT leaders are constantly juggling shifting priorities when it comes to technology selections and budgets. While they continue to invest in data centers and the cloud to support AI and GenAI aspirations, they also want to streamline and find efficiencies in core operations.

Gartner clearly signals this in their mid-year Worldwide IT Spending Forecast, where they project 2024 to see 7.5% overall spending growth, mainly in data center systems and software, tied in large part to AI and GenAI goals.

Despite ongoing investments in these areas, customers know they need to find even more headroom in their budgets. Initial AI and GenAI POCs and pilots have made it abundantly clear that going into production would likely mean skyrocketing compute and data management costs.

These pilots have also highlighted the need to shore up data foundations to support the data quality, governance and availability demands of both AI/GenAI and core operations.

The Power of Two – Pentaho and Hyperscaler Marketplaces

Leading hyperscalers have well-established marketplaces to help customers readily and easily identify and bundle proven technology solutions with their services for scale and cost efficiency.

Bundling and aligning strategic software purchases through these marketplaces enables customers to:

• streamline purchasing efforts and extend purchasing power;
• scale existing budgets and align software spend with cloud and hybrid strategies;
• reduce product trial and production implementation costs and overhead;
• and increase selection confidence with vetted solutions that guarantee seamless integration and deployment efficiencies.

We’re proud to have the latest versions of Pentaho Data Integration and Pentaho Data Catalog now available on the AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace.

Customers who leverage AWS or Azure as part of their hybrid data management strategies can benefit from Pentaho’s ability to simplify access, transformation and availability of data from any source while enabling essential data quality, governance and security strategies.

The Pentaho+ Platform helps organizations become data fit by organizing and providing secure and governed access to data for any user, leveraging lightweight architecture, automation, templates and APIs to efficiently and cost-effectively simplify data management for organizations operating in a complex and regulatory-intensive landscape.

To learn more about the power of combining Pentaho with either AWS or Azure visit: 

AWS Marketplace

• Pentaho Data Integration (Bring Your Own License)
• Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics (Bring Your Own License)
• Pentaho Data Integration – Free Trial
• Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics – Free Trial
• Pentaho Data Catalog – Free Trial

Azure Marketplace

• Pentaho Data Integration (Bring Your Own License)
• Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics (Bring Your Own License)
• Pentaho Data Integration – Free Trial
• Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics – Free Trial
• Pentaho Data Catalog – Free Trial

The post Simplifying and Scaling Hybrid Data Workloads – Pentaho Data Integration and Pentaho Data Catalog Now Available on Leading Hyperscaler Marketplaces first appeared on Pentaho.

The good news? Transitioning doesn’t mean starting over or losing the work you’ve already put in. With Pentaho+, you can retain the reporting systems that work while benefiting from a more flexible, scalable, and future-ready platform. 

Understanding the Transition from Crystal Reports

SAP has already announced the end of mainstream support for Crystal Reports 2016 as of December 2022, with full support ending in 2024. While Classic Crystal Reports will remain, the phase-out of CR4E is an opportunity to rethink and optimize your reporting infrastructure. 

Continuing with outdated versions of Crystal Reports poses risks, including: 

• High licensing costs that make it difficult to scale. 

• Limited real-time data integration, leading to slower, manual reporting processes. 

• Limited cloud and hybrid support, restricting your ability to adapt to modern infrastructure needs. 

• Desktop-only application for report creation, which can be complex to deploy across large teams. 

As your business grows, these limitations can hold you back. But this transition doesn’t have to mean abandoning everything you’ve built—it’s a chance to upgrade strategically. 

A Simple and Powerful Transition with Pentaho+

Moving from Crystal Reports to Pentaho+ ensures that your organization retains the reporting functionality you rely on while upgrading to a more modern, capable platform. Here’s how Pentaho+ simplifies the transition: 

1. Familiar Tools, Easier Transition: If your team is familiar with Crystal Reports, the transition to Pentaho+ will be seamless. Pentaho Business Analytics offers a familiar interface, minimizing the learning curve and making it easy to migrate existing reports and data. Your team can continue to work as they have, only with greater flexibility and efficiency. This isn’t starting over—it’s building on your existing reporting infrastructure and giving you additional flexibility with multiple deployment options (desktop or web-based, on-prem, or within your AWS/Azure environment). 
2. Maintain Your Pixel-Perfect Reports: One of the main concerns when moving away from Crystal Reports is the potential loss of the precise, pixel-perfect reports your business depends on. Pentaho+ not only preserves the quality of these reports but enhances them with additional customization options and flexibility.
3. Future-Proof with Real-Time Data Integration: Where Crystal Reports falls short with its static data reporting, Pentaho+ excels with real-time data integration. This allows you to make decisions based on up-to-the-minute insights rather than relying on outdated, manual reports. It’s not just a replacement – it’s a significant upgrade. 
4. Advanced Analytics with AI and Machine Learning: The future of business intelligence is AI. Pentaho+ comes fully equipped to support AI and machine learning workflows, preparing your organization for the next generation of data-driven decision-making.  

Read more in our Solution Profile

A Smooth Migration = Business as Usual, Only Better

Unlike many other platform transitions, moving from Crystal Reports to Pentaho+ is a smooth process. With robust migration tools and ongoing support, Pentaho+ ensures minimal downtime and disruption to your daily operations. Additionally, the transition gives you immediate access to a suite of advanced analytics tools that deliver: 

• Real-time insights that drive faster, more accurate decision-making. 

• Scalability that grows with your business without incurring high additional costs. 

• Advanced security features such as row-level security and customizable policies to ensure your data remains safe. 

Dive in deeper and download the Comparison Sheet

Don’t Let the End of CR4E Hold You Back—Leverage It to Advance

The phase-out of Crystal Reports for Enterprise (CR4E) doesn’t need to be a setback—it can be a strategic turning point. With Pentaho+, you not only preserve the work you’ve put into your reporting system, but you also unlock a new level of potential with real-time insights, AI integration, and scalable analytics that evolve with your business. 

Don’t fall behind as the data landscape evolves – stay ahead with Pentaho+. 

Ready to Make the Transition?

If you’re ready to start your journey to more advanced, flexible reporting, schedule a personalized demo today and see firsthand how Pentaho+ can empower your business to grow without missing a beat. 

The post Avoiding Crystal Reports End of Life Gaps with Pentaho+ first appeared on Pentaho.