What makes Pentaho unique to other existing BI solutions is the vast data connectivity provided by the Pentaho abstraction layer. This makes it a very complete solution for data integration across many heterogonous entry systems and storages.

Pentaho's OLAP solution also provides flexibility on various relational database engines, regardless of whether it is a proprietary database or open source.

The big benefit of Pentaho is its clear vision in adapting Big Data sources and NoSQL solutions, which is more and more accepted in enterprises across the world.

Apache Hadoop has become increasingly popular, and with it, the growing features of Pentaho have proven themselves able to catch up with it. Once you have the Hadoop platform, you can use Pentaho to put or read data in HDFS (Hadoop Distribution File System) format and also orchestrate a map-reduced process in Hadoop clusters with an easy-to-use GUI designer.

Pentaho has also emphasized visualization, the key ingredient of any analytic platform. Their recent acquisition of the Portugal-based business analytic solution company, Webdetails, clearly shows this. Webdetails brought on board a fantastic set of UI-based community tools (known as CTools) such as Community Dashboard Framework (CDF), and Community Data Access (CDA).