CSC Boosts Its Big Data Platform Capabilities With Pentaho OEM Deal

CSC is expanding the data integration capabilities of its big data Platform-as-a-Service (BD PaaS) offering through a global OEM deal with Pentaho, the two companies said Tuesday.

Adding Pentaho's data ETL (extract, transform and load) technology to CSC's BD PaaS will provide the system integrator's customers with ways to migrate data between legacy IT systems and newer systems such as cloud applications and business analytics systems, according to Eddie Satterly, chief technology officer of CSC's emerging business group.

While CSC (No. 5 in the 2015 CRN Solution Provider 500) evaluated data ETL tools from other vendors, "this was really the only solution that made sense for us to go forward with," Satterly said in an interview with CRN. Terms of the OEM deal weren't disclosed.

[Related: It's Official: CSC Splitting Into Separate $8B Commercial, $4B Government Companies]

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For Pentaho, the deal comes just a month after the business analytics and ETL software company was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems for an undisclosed sum. It's also Pentaho's first cloud service alliance, said Eddie White, Pentaho's executive vice president of business development.

ETL systems are used to move data between databases, applications and other systems and to reformat and otherwise clean up the data when needed. That can be a tedious manual chore without tools like Pentaho to help automate the process.

CSC has some 1,500 programmers "who do nothing but write SQL code" to help customers move data, Satterly said. With Pentaho's software to automate more of that work, CSC can devote more of its resources to higher-value services, he said.

In addition to blending data from diverse sources, the Pentaho technology can help CSC customers with data governance tasks. Pentaho's front-end analytics tools also will be available to CSC customers through the deal, although Satterly said the ETL technology was the core of the OEM alliance.

CSC BD PaaS is based on the big data platform technology CSC acquired in August 2013 when it bought Infochimps for an undisclosed amount. The platform also incorporates technology from CVC's October 2012 acquisition of 42Six Solutions.

CSC partners with a number of major vendors, including Oracle, SAP and IBM, and the BD PaaS system is integrated with those vendor's data sources, along with the Hadoop big data platform and MongoDB NoSQL database.

The Pentaho technology has been integrated with BD PaaS, according to Satterly, and one customer already has the system in use, a second is implementing it and others are in the pipeline.

PUBLISHED JULY 7, 2015