Data Mining

Pentaho announced that it has acquired the Weka open source data mining project developed by the University of Waikato in New Zealand. Weka's advanced analytics equip users with the tools to identify complex patterns, associations and correlations that are critical to evaluating business performance and supporting strategic planning initiatives, particularly in consumer-driven industries such as retail, financial services, communications and consumer packaged goods.

The Pentaho and Weka teams will soon announce a road map covering their plans for enhancements including extension of Weka's analytic techniques to additional vertical industries, and integration of Weka with Pentaho's platform, data integration, and information delivery capabilities.

"Through the acquisition of the Weka project, Pentaho continues to show that there is no capability or application in the business intelligence market that can't or won't be addressed by the open source community," said Andre Boisvert, Chairman and co-founder of Pentaho. "This latest acquisition provides our partners and customers with a broad, yet modular solution to address a full spectrum of business problems from historical reporting and analysis, to data integration, to advanced analytics and now data mining. Having served as the former President & COO of SAS Institute Inc, the world's leading proprietary data mining software vendor, I have a good appreciation for what an excellent product the Weka project has produced. Though both SAS and Weka originated in academia, I believe that Weka will ultimately become the de facto standard due to the fact that it is open source and that is has a very vibrant, world wide community behind the project."

Originally created in 1993, and available on sourceforge.net since 2000, the Weka project was established by the University of Waikato as a platform for the research and testing of advanced machine learning techniques. Since then, Weka has developed a large and loyal following in both academic and industry circles, and has been downloaded more than 600,000 times. The Weka project is now so popular that it has spawned more than two dozen extension projects, tailoring and extending Weka's powerful analytical techniques with advanced visualization, industry-specific algorithms, and more.

Organizations use Weka's data mining tools to understand relationships between internal factors like price, product placement, or staff skills as well as external factors like economic indicators, competition, and target market demographics; analyze the impact of potential changes to critical business metrics like sales volumes, customer loyalty, and profitability; and perform business-critical calculations such as market-basket analysis, customer segmentation, pricing optimization and fraud detection.

Pentaho's acquisition of the Weka project is the latest chapter in a series of initiatives designed to accelerate the development of best-in-class, integrated open source BI projects. Pentaho previously integrated the JFreeReport reporting, Mondrian OLAP and Kettle data integration projects with the Pentaho open source BI platform, and also delivered functional enhancements to those projects.