ORLANDO, Fla., March 19, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Delivering the future of business analytics, Pentaho Corporation today announced it has reached a milestone within the federal sector becoming part of the General Services Administration (GSA) Multiple Award Schedule Program (MAS). The MAS program ensures federal agencies can easily find best-of-breed vendors and partners to solve various efficiency, productivity and technology challenges faced by many businesses today through the GSA Advantage! portal. Dozens of agencies already utilize Pentaho Business Analytics including more than 20 of the top civilian and military organizations.

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Two of Pentaho's key strategic partners in the government sector Carahsoft and Cloudera have been instrumental in the company ongoing efforts to provide critical big data and analytics solutions to major government affiliated organizations.

"Pentaho's solutions address the government's critical demand for cost-efficient, best-of-breed technologies that solve big data challenges and expand on our relationships with Red Hat, Cloudera and other key open source software companies," said Natalie Gregory, vice president of Carahsoft's open source solutions team.  "We're pleased to work with Pentaho, an innovator and leader, and to make the company's offerings available to our ecosystem of partners and customers who are interested in doing more, easily with their data."

"Government agencies are under tremendous pressure to maximize budgets and minimize the time to implement comprehensive data analytics solutions that support critical applications, including fraud detection and cyber-related threats," said Tim Stevens, vice president of business and corporate development at Cloudera. "With an innovative and open approach to solving big data challenges, Pentaho and Cloudera minimize the complexity and time associated with implementing big data solutions in the federal sector." 

Pentaho anticipates a growing federal government big data market opportunity.  In a survey conducted in August 2012 by the 1105 Government Information Group, 63 percent of the almost 200 respondents agreed that unless they implement and use big data it will be more difficult to meet their agency's mission.  Additionally, in March of 2012, the Obama Administration announced The Big Data Research and Development Initiative, which includes more than $200 million in new funding commitments.

"Now that Pentaho is part of the MAS program, major organizations previously unable to utilize Pentaho's offerings have access to our big data and analytics solutions," said Dave Diegtel, Federal Sales Manager, Pentaho Corporation. "Government agencies face many of the same issues as many large global businesses, whether detecting fraud or working in the cloud to streamline productivity and make better decisions. However, they also have some unique challenges such as providing the federal agencies with real-time all-source intelligence or analyzing cyber related data."

Pentaho meets the unique requirements of government agencies with its broad access to all types of data sources, highly-scalable nature, cost-efficient pricing and ease of use. 

• To find out more about Pentaho's government capabilities visit: http://www.pentaho.com/explore/industries-federal-government/.
• Watch the recent big data and government webinar hosted by Carahsoft.
• Attend Pentaho presentation at Carasoft's Open Source Government Summit titled, "Government IT Issues and How Open Source Delivers" on March 21, 2013, at the Marriott Metro Center in Washington D.C.
• Try Pentaho NOW. Watch a demo, test drive the product and download a 30-day free trial.

About Pentaho Corporation
Pentaho is delivering the future of big data business analytics. Pentaho's open source heritage drives our continued innovation in a modern, integrated, embeddable platform built for the future of analytics, including diverse and big data requirements. Pentaho is the only vendor that provides a full big data analytics solution that supports the entire big data analytics process, from data integration through interactive data visualization, exploration and predictive analytics. Pentaho natively supports Apache Hadoop, Cloudera, MongoDB as well as high performance analytic databases like Greenplum and Vertica, among other big data sources.  Learn more and download for free at pentahobigdata.com/download

SOURCE Pentaho Corporation