Customers Speak out – Wisdom of the Crowds Business Intelligence Study, 2013

May 21, 2013

Pentaho-wisdom-panel“Responsiveness”, “professionalism”, “knowledge” and “experience”– these are just a few of the words our customers used in giving Pentaho the honor of being recently named a top business intelligence technology vendor in the third annual independent Wisdom of Crowds® Business Intelligence Market Study conducted by Dresner Advisory Services, LLC. The report recognizes Pentaho as a “High Growth BI Software” company with a critical mass of customers growing well above the average.

We have made and continue to make significant investments in simplifying and delivering real value in big data integration and analytics and our customers’ satisfaction. Being named a ‘high growth vendor’ validates that we are experiencing high growth in concert with the big data market, but not at the expense of our customers.

Pentaho earned high marks from its customers on multiple metrics specifically standing out in product, support, consulting and integrity.  This independent research comes straight from the voice of our customers, which is the best possible acknowledgement that we are indeed delivering the future of analytics.

I encourage you to download the full Wisdom of Crowds report to learn how the top vendors stack up and the top BI trends.

Donna Prlich
Senior Director, Product Marketing

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What do famous fashionistas and Pentaho have in common?

October 12, 2012

What do the Olsen Twins, Rachel Bilson, Jessica Simpson, Justin Timberlake and Pentaho all have in common? We are all associated with the same social e-commerce company, BeachMint. BeachMint is a truly innovative and forward thinking online retailer that sells jewelry, clothes, shoes, home furnishings, beauty supplies and more through a subscription model with the help of celebrity stylist (a few mentioned above). The business analytics in the background helping to drive sales of these stylish goods curated by famous fashionistas is Pentaho Business Analytics.

BeachMint is using Pentaho Business Analytics, MySQL and HP Vertica to quickly slice and dice terabytes of “big data” and millions of daily emails, plus record click stream data. Pentaho Business Analytics provides reporting, dashboards, analysis and data visualization and capabilities to help with social monitoring, customer retention, financial reporting, product and website optimization and more.

Doug Cohen, Director of Business Analytics at BeachMint explains “For cost-conscious start-ups, Pentaho and open source are a no brainer for enabling rapid scale. You can easily compare it to proprietary tools that might not even work. I’ve been doing analytics in other industries such as gaming and advertising for years and have seen situations where coupon errors went on for days with hundreds of thousands of dollars lost. Using Pentaho, we are able to keep close tabs on the pulse of our online communities.”

Smarter, faster and more creative, BeachMint does business in an innovative way with different rules, budgets, customers and time to market. A perfect fit for Pentaho and the future of analytics.

Read more about BeachMint use of Pentaho and let us know what you think.

If you are interested in fashion and home décor, we suggest you check them out! Several of us at Pentaho are big fans!

Donna Prlich
Director, Product Marketing
Pentaho

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Pentaho Customer Success Update

August 27, 2012

We are lucky to have such awesome customers at Pentaho from all verticals such as retail, healthcare, travel, finance and education. Here is a list of a few of our newest customer stories.

BeachMint - Innovative venture capital-backed online retail company built from the ground up with Pentaho. This is an interesting story about how company-wide access to analytics can drive operational excellence, improving customer experience and maximize revenues. They are a big data example — using Kettle with HP Vertica.

Oklahoma School of Community Medicine - This is an innovative story about medical students using Pentaho to help change the way they treat patients. Unique about this story is that the driver for analytics is the head of the medical program (very non-technical).

Lufthansa ­ Largest European airline by number of passengers and revenue, relies on Pentaho to monitor one of its most important core processes, the handover of passenger data between different airlines. Read the full case study in English and German.

the lewis group – Leading UK debt collection agency rolled out Pentaho to deliver performance management dashboards to help improve operational efficiency. They now are analyzing data daily through reports on a client, department and individual level.

Pharos Resources – SaaS provider of retention intelligence for higher education colleges and universities, embedded Pentaho Business Analytics into its Pharos Insight offering and went to market in just four weeks. With enhanced analytics using Pentaho, Pharos has leapfrogged competitors, expanded into new markets, seen 25% revenue growth and a great increase in customer ROI. Watch the customer webcast: Pentaho to Go to Market with Higher Education Student Retention Product in Four Weeks and read the case study.

You can view all Pentaho customer success stories here: http://www.pentaho.com/customers/success-stories/

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StoneGate Senior Living experiences 2800% ROI with Pentaho

June 18, 2012

In health and senior care, where the top priority is patient well-being, every penny of IT investment has to count.  Therefore, we are excited to announce that our customer, StoneGate Senior Living, has been named a Nucleus Research 2012 Technology ROI award winner.  Nucleus Research granted StoneGate this prestigious award for its integration of social collaboration, mobile access and analytics resulting in a 2800% return on investment!

Nucleus Research’s Technology ROI Award is granted to the top ten organizations each year that have maximized the value per dollar of their IT deployments.  Considering that this year’s award winners have achieved the highest cumulative ROI to date, we are especially proud to celebrate StoneGate’s success.

StoneGate Senior Living, which provides a range of support services to senior living and care properties, had been struggling to track and manage its overtime pay and expenses.  To resolve this, StoneGate established the Pentaho Business Analytics platform as the foundation for a new expense management system.

By aligning IT strategy and business goals using Pentaho Business Analytics, StoneGate has automated expense data collection and analysis across all 30 StoneGate facilities, resulting in an average annual benefit totalling $2,088,677.  StoneGate has achieved many other benefits including reducing overtime costs, accelerating accounts payable and automating other processes. The estimated payback occurred only two weeks into the Pentaho deployment.

Now that Pentaho Business Analytics has been successfully integrated, the sky’s the limit for StoneGate.  We are delighted to have been able to help StoneGate achieve its business goals and we extend our warmest congratulations to their team on this outstanding achievement!

Interested in learning more? Click here to read the case study about StoneGate’s Pentaho implementation, which includes the details of how the ROI for the Nucleus Award was assessed.

Rosanne Saccone
CMO

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The Diary of a Construction Manger in Love with His BI Tool

June 7, 2012

Hi, my name is Bob and I am a construction manager. I oversee all aspects of managing the operations of a construction project, including budgets, staffing, and the compliance of the entire construction project.

In 10+ years of my experience, I have never had a Business Intelligence (BI) tool. I had to create spreadsheets to track daily activities, calculate risks and build formulas to measure impact. Given the size of the projects I worked on, this was extremely complex.  As a result, I would spend a lot of my time putting out fires to problems that I knew could have been prevented if I had the right information.

Recently my company introduced BI to our team. Since I’m using BI for the first time, I decided to create an activity log similar to a diary of my project.

Let me share some highlights with you:

October 28, 2011

We are 4 weeks into the project. We have the crew working on the ground. The foundation is done. The structural engineer has finished his design. We are ready to roll.

January 11, 2012

This morning I received an alert about my Preventative vs. Corrective Maintenance. My monthly work mix by type looks like this: preventative 36%; repair 24%; rebuild 5%; and modify 35%. My preventative costs have gone down from an optimal 40% to 36% and my repair costs have increased correspondingly.

When I drilled down into the repairs, I see that we are responding to higher than normal number of heating and insulation work items. I am going to talk to Edward – my HVAC contractor – about it.

February 29, 2012

I have been monitoring our electrical work. Our average Cost per SQ Foot is 13% less than industry average. This is a breakthrough thanks to the changes I have made monitoring the project with BI and making data-driven decisions. It lets me monitor these costs on an ongoing basis, so I can take preventative actions to stay below industry average to protect our funding and even justify additional headcount.

March 16, 2012

Productivity Rate is one of my favorite indicators – because it truly provides me with real-time info about the performance of my team. On average, our productivity rate stays on optimal levels. However, the plumbing trade group’s actual cost is exceeding the estimated costs. This will affect my cost-to-complete and margins, as I have to pay overtime for this contractor.

But I don’t have to worry… my BI tool lets me drill into this indicator to see whether the reason is ‘labor’ or ‘supply’ related. Drill-thru was something a spreadsheet could never let me do.

March 30, 2012

Two weeks have passed since I shifted resources for plumbing. Our productivity rates have improved since then and the project is looking on time and on budget.

With 40 more days to go, I want to make sure we deliver on time and meet our SLA with the building owners. I see no bottlenecks. Cycle Times – the average time to complete an activity – shows me that we are actually 4 days ahead of the schedule.

May 21, 2012

I’m very happy to report that we are done with the construction. The ROI on this project was greater than we expected and my client is very happy. Next weekend is the Memorial Day weekend. I have the time and money I need to take a nice vacation with my wife and son.

-As told by Bob, a fictional construction manager.

Even though the story is fictional, it’s based on reality. Business users and project managers – such as facility managers, supply chain logistic specialists, even dairy farmers – use Pentaho business intelligence to make their jobs easier and to make smarter, data driven decisions – just like our fictional friend, Bob.

Who knew BI could be so handy for construction managers?

What is your secret BI story? Drop me a line.

- Farnaz Erfan, Product Marketing, Pentaho

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Customer Success with Pentaho: TravelTainment

February 29, 2012

Think about the last time you went to book travel online. Do you remember the number of searches you conducted? Options you compared? Transactions you made? You probably are not aware of the terabytes of data you have created from your search that the online travel platform you are using has to process. Like most end users you are just interested in a tool that is easy to use and produces fast results.

Pentaho customer, TravelTainment is very familiar with this use case as a leading provider of software solutions for the travel industry. TravelTainment’s solutions are integrated with major international travel portals across Europe such as opodo.de, tui.de, expedia.co.uk and thomascook.fr, as well as thousands of travel agencies in more than 30 countries.

With the continually booming online travel market, TravelTainment’s different clients such as tour operators and travel portals, require more insight into their data and reporting to help them plan promotions and other services. Before using Pentaho, the company had acquired a set of legacy systems that had grown around individual products with only limited reporting capabilities. As a result, reporting was inefficient and time consuming for IT.

TravelTainment chose Pentaho Business Analytics for its self-service reporting and ability to manage big data sets. It enables enrichment, reporting, analysis and visualization of TravelTainments very large data volumes in such a way that also non-technical users can easily understand them. With the new solution, the company runs reports three times faster and with more flexibility than before and can now, for the first time, offer its clients user-friendly, self-service and ad-hoc reporting services. This also means that TravelTainment’s developer team can fully concentrate on its main business, rather than having to serve as a service desk for reporting.

TravelTainment is using Pentaho for reasons beyond it being open source-friendly. They are using it with their big data environment, which includes Apache Hadoop MapReduce, and for low-latency data access they are using Apache HBase.  For detailed data they are using Infobright as an SQL-based self-service interface. They are now planning to use Pentaho Data Integration to easily load, process, and extract data in Apache Hadoop.

“Pentaho Business Analytics fits perfectly into our open source Big Data environment. The outstanding self-service analytics and reporting capabilities help TravelTainment build out expertise and offer better reporting services to our customers.”

– Ibrahim Husseini, Director of Data Warehouse, TravelTainment

Read the press release and full case study about TravelTainments use of Pentaho at http://www.pentaho.com/customers/67/traveltainment.

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Pentaho News Recap Dec 5-9

December 12, 2011

Last week (Dec 5-9)  was an exciting week for Pentaho in the press, with analyst and customers. Here’s a short recap:

Announcements

Customers in the news

Pentaho European Press and Analyst tour

Pentaho new CEO, Quentin Gallivan, visited five countries in five days and was able to meet with several influential press, analyst, customers and the EMEA Pentaho team. The great press from this tour is just starting to publish. Here are a few articles that have appeared:

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Customer Success with Pentaho: Cinca

November 10, 2011

Business analytics are very valuable in higher education due to the volume and range of decisions, with both political and financial impact, that universities need to make throughout the academic year related to things like student taxes, course offerings, building maintenance and human resources.

To address the specific needs of universities, Pentaho customer, Cineca, developed an integrated information system for higher education institutions, called U-GOV, which includes a business intelligence and analytics suite specifically designed for universities and called U-GOV Planning and Controlling. U-GOV Planning and Controlling consists of nine different integrated modules including accounting, human resources, research and student analytics, a planning and budgeting process, dashboards and key performance indicators, as well as best practices adapted to the university environment. Thirty universities currently use the software.

To make the system more sustainable and easier to manage, Cineca decided to replace all proprietary business intelligence platforms (Microstrategy and Qliktech) and standardize on a single open source business analytics platform. After an in-depth evaluation by its research lab, Cineca chose Pentaho for its integration capabilities, meta data management, OLAP capabilities, cost, user functionality, service support and centralized product management. Currently, U-GOV Planning and Controlling is in its second phase of migration and the results have been so positive already that Cineca plans to offer it beyond Italy.

Nicola Bertazzoni, External Relations at Cineca said, “By embedding Pentaho Business Analytics, Cineca can provide its 30 U-GOV Planning and Controlling customers with much less complexity and more benefits. We can now deliver sophisticated views of operational data, in time, to support much sounder planning decisions. Embedding Pentaho has been such a success we are looking to expand our operations internationally.”

Read the full customer success story about Cineca embedding Pentaho Business Analytics.

Explore the benefits of embedding amazing analytics into your application.

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From Convicted Felons to Wall Street Investors – Business Analytics is for All

October 28, 2011

This week US Politics Today highlighted a case study about how NYC Department of Probation is using Pentaho Business Analytics to gain visibility into the lives of 35,000 convicted felons, helping them get back into their communities and building productive lives under a monitored probation program.

At the heart of NYC Department of Probation’s mission to “restructuring lives” is powerful analytics, giving the department access to massive amounts of data, such as detailed information on the background of the men, women and young people being supervised, the types of crimes that they have committed and their progress.

This is a vivid example on how powerful analytics is empowering public sector and government organizations to improve their performance, streamline their administration services, and ultimately help the public. Business Analytics is no longer a novelty specifically made for investors, financial analysts, and executive managers. Today business analytics serves all.

Anibal Sempertegui, director of information technology, software, New York City Department of Probation explained, “Because of Pentaho’s open source business model, we can affordable to make it accessible throughout our department and use it to facilitate data integration with other city departments as well. Overall, the New York City Department of Probation has realized huge cost savings with Pentaho Business Analytics. We figure that we are paying 80 percent less than we would with a commercial business intelligence application for licensing, maintenance and support.” 

Growing populations, presidential budget proposals, and new economic developments calls for smart investment in business analytics in all areas of the government including:

  • Health and Human Services
  • Social Security Administration
  • Defense
  • Treasury
  • Criminal Justice
  • Transportation
  • Education
  • And more….

Government agencies can now ‘Occupy‘ powerful business analytics with Pentaho at 80 percent less cost than proprietary vendors. Learn more about how Pentaho helps NYC Department of Probation police its data.

Farnaz Erfan
Product Marketing
Pentaho

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Customer Success With Pentaho: Cipal

October 3, 2011

Last month we shared with you a story of how Kiva was using Pentaho to change the world through micro financing. Today, we are exciting to share how Pentaho OEM Partner, Cipal, is facilitating change at Belgium’s social welfare organizations. Cipal an IT service provider to Belgium’s public sector, has completed a successful pilot of its Pentaho-based OEM application ‘Athena BI’ with four social welfare organizations in the Flanders region.

Following an exhaustive review of traditional and open source BI options, Cipal chose Pentaho Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to power Athena BI. Cipal is implementing the full Pentaho BI suite, which includes data integration, dashboards, reporting, analysis and data mining. Cipal chose Pentaho for Athena BI because it offered the widest range of fully integrated modules, the best total cost of ownership and flexible infrastructure that supported its open, Cloud-based platform.

According to Sven Meermans, Business Development Manager, Business Intelligence, Cipal, “Pentaho BI turned out to be the ideal platform for our Cloud-based Athena BI OEM application, which we have rolled out to four social welfare associations in Flanders. Pentaho BI supports all our current needs to provide services like data integration and analytics and will support planned capabilities like data mining. Pentaho really supported our efforts to deliver Athena BI to our customers on spec, on time and on budget.”

The early results of the Athena BI pilot have exceeded Cipal’s expectations and feedback from social welfare organizations is very encouraging. These include:

  • Rapid time-to-value– The Athena BI pilot was completed and rolled out within budget to four social welfare associations in just four months.
  • Power to the user– Human Resource managers are now empowered to create, customize and analyze their own reports on their own time, without reliance on IT.
  • A step towards change– After the success of the pilot project with Human Resources data, Athena BI will now be rolled out to more social welfare associations, municipalities and provinces adding new functionality to monitor financial and other data.

Visit Pentaho.com to read the full story on how Cipal embeds Pentaho BI to help Belgium municipalities monitor and measure performance.

Watch on demand – OEM Tech Series Webcast: Architecture of the BI Server

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