Why do we need to upgrade Pentaho?

Pentaho Upgrade – Will it save money, improve performance?

Before we go into the details Pentaho upgrade, let us really see how this could help your enterprise to overcome the challenges you face currently?

Major Reasons to upgrade Pentaho 
Check if you have any of these challenges as of now with your current Pentaho implementation

1. Compliance: No support for older versions of Pentaho, Older version of Java which will fail you in audits and all other dependent 3rd party components are of an older version either without support or obsolete?
2. Performance: Implementation done in the past when the stack was evolving and it is not yielding the required performance in terms of processing data or rendering required insights on time? Are you under utilizing your infrastructure?
3. Support Overheads: Your data pipeline has many points of failure and requires everyday attention to rerun, fix the data issues, require manual intervention and thereby reducing the credibility of the users?
4. No Vendor, In House: You have inherited the past implementation, the old vendor is gone, you are purely dependent on some ins house person whose time is consumed just to handle the support issues and no further enhancements, inability to scale as per the business needs?

These are some challenges which are hurting your journey to enable your enterprise to make fast and effective decisions using your data and if any of the above challenges are true, you are qualified to upgrade

When you are ready for Pentaho 7 upgrade, follow a 3-step process, before, during and after. The key is to focus more on before, as the challenge is to understand the existing implementation and focus on the right value yielding changes to be done on top of the default moving of your current implementation into a newer version.

Pentaho 7.0 Pre-Upgrade
As part of the Pentaho pre-upgrade audit the following key areas, which will give a clear picture of what needs to be fixed

Evaluate each of these above areas and in specific your customization, extensions and have a clear list of priorities in terms of what needs to considered as value additions to be performed during the upgrade.

Pentaho 7.0 Upgrade
Define the path based on where you are and to which version you are moving to, and also understand the overall roadmap of Pentaho value adds in current and future versions, optimal way is to move all you’re existing into a new setup without disturbing the existing version which is running live, it is a defined clear 8-step process

Once you are done with the above steps, you have the latest version with all the priority fixes and improvements as agreed and evaluated during the pre-upgrade steps.

Pentaho 7.0 Post Upgrade
Have a clear checklist and dataset to validate and ensure the functional aspects, performance improvements, reduced point of failures, capability to rerun, etc.,

Test it thoroughly with your users and then switch over.

Key Benefits

• Meet the Compliance
• Improved performance by 30%
• Reduced overheads in terms of support by 30%
• Inbuilt Monitoring, User Behavior using Operations Mart
• Right Utilization of your infrastructure

Conclusion
Perform Pentaho Pre-upgrade with care and define your priorities against the challenges and focus on those areas of improvement on top of what Pentaho the latest version brings into the picture.