Data integration processes (often called ETL when building a datawarehouse or data prep when an analyst is massaging data) can take place in Pentaho so that the massive work of massaging and cleaning data does not have to be tightly bound to a specific datawarehouse technology or to complicated programming methods.
The Extract, Transformation and Load (ETL) process that cleans up the data and ensures data integrity, the datawarehouse that acts as a scalable and reliable repository for data derived from many sources, and some form of search acceleration for large data volumes are all still needed, and an enlightened IT group is needed to install and maintain them.