Pentaho Provides CFOs with the Ultimate Guide for Buying BI

Small and medium businesses are fast growing adopters of BI solutions. THE thing that was previously exclusive to large enterprises – i.e. “BI for the masses” – is now making it to the main streets of small and medium businesses and growing more and more popular by the minute.

The good news is that there is a wide range of Business Intelligence solutions available in the market. The bad news is that not all BI solutions are a perfect fit for SMBs.

Due to high growth, tight budgets, and lean organizational structures, SMBs require different kind of Business Intelligence.

Certainly the initial software acquisition costs is part of the allocated budget for SMBs, and the less expensive the solution looks on paper, the more attractive it appears. But there is more to it. For example, the timeline that it takes to reach an ROI breakeven point, as well as technical resources required for implementing changes and integrating with other software / solutions are all significant parts of the total cost. User growth is another area that can become very costly depending on the type of BI solution.

Because the BI market has matured and been shaped mostly according to the needs of large enterprises, SMB need to look deeper and identify important BI considerations that only apply to them, and focus on evaluating them before making a purchasing decision.

Regardless of what you ultimately select as your BI solution of choice, we are offering this whitepaper to help smaller and more nimble organizations

• Know what to expect from a BI solution
• Highlight things that most BI vendors don’t want you to know
• Give you an evaluation checklist that can help you ask the right questions before you buy.

Download “CFO’s Ultimate Guide to Buying Business Intelligence” at http://www.pentaho.com/cfo-ultimate-guide-to-buying-bi/

Register for the webinar on September 22 to hear directly from Pentaho’s CFO and COO, Doug Johnson, about important considerations that CFO’s of SMB need to think through before they buy. http://www.pentaho.com/events/20110922-CFO-buying-guide-webinar/

Farnaz Erfan

Pentaho Product Marketing

What does the economic BI buyer know about Agile BI that you don’t?

Agile is a familiar term to product managers and software developers who are looking to build rapid prototypes and iterate through software development life cycles fairly quickly and effectively.

With recent market trends, Agile has now made it to the agenda of the economic BI buyer. If you are a CFO, CIO, or CEO, and have been hearing about Agile BI in the industry, you are probably looking to quantify the benefits of Agile BI in terms of direct cost savings.

As a CxO you know that your Business Intelligence costs are mainly driven by these 4 areas:

1. License acquisition costs
2. Skill development and training
3. Project deployment duration and man hours
4. Ongoing cost of change management once the solution is deployed

The question is whether Agile BI can save you costs in any of these categories? While Agile BI can immediately imply faster deployment of the BI solution (#3 above), in Pentaho we add value in all the 4 areas. Here is how:

1. Consolidation of licenses: Any BI implementation requires some form of Data Integration, Data Warehousing/Data Mart development, and Data Visualization (Reports, Analysis, and Dashboards). Current BI vendors in the market have disparate products for each of these areas, and offer each product at a separate license acquisition and maintenance cost. Pentaho provides great value in this area as it includes all these components in “one” subscription to Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition, giving you an ultimate price tag that is by far a fraction of the cost of other BI tools in the market.

2. Collapsing skill sets into one: Each specialized tool mentioned above also requires a set of highly trained staff. In a traditional BI project, a crew of ETL Developers, DBAs, Data Modelers, and BI Developers were involved, each building one piece of the big puzzle. An all in one tool such as Pentaho BI Suite EE offers “one” single integrated tool set for all areas of BI development. This enables organizations to collapse the diverse skill sets into one. This level of self-sufficiency reduces the amount of IT staff that needs to be on board for building and maintaining a successful BI program.

3. Rapid deployment – Pentaho offers an Agile Development Environment, as part of its BI Suite EE. This integrated data integration and business intelligence development environment turns data to decision in a matter of days as opposed to months/ years. Interactive data explorations and visualizations for slicing and dicing data across multiple sources are instantly auto-generated using this tool. Unlike a waterfall approach, this tool allows business and technical teams to build quick prototypes, and iterate upon that all within a unified workspace that empowers sharing, collaboration, and rapid results.

4. Rapid change management – The need for quick turnarounds when adding additional business metrics or changing existing ones is a reality in BI deployments. When disparate tools are used, adding a new data source, or changing a metric, can take a long time. With Agile BI Development Environment, unique to Pentaho, any change to ETL flows or to the business semantic layer, is automatically reflected in the visualization layer (Reporting, Analysis, Dashboards). This helps organizations to quickly incorporate changes and adjust their BI solution to current business requirements, without long wait times and IT bottleneck delays.

Ready to start saving? How about this….try the Agile BI functionality of Pentaho BI Suite or Pentaho Data Integration for FREE (30-day supported enterprise evaluation).

This blog was originally posted on Business Intelligence From The Swamp

Farnaz Erfan

Pentaho Product Marketing

3 questions that every CFO wants to know about Pentaho (and how to answer them)

1. Will it do what I need?

2. Will it get done on time?

3. Will it fit my budget?

These are pretty much the 3 questions that any IT Manager will ask him/herself when it comes to evaluating and investing in any type of software. Open Source BI is no different. Call it an over-simplified RFI (Request for Information) or “make my CFO approve my gut feeling” checklist, these questions are essentially what you need to know to go forward with a purchasing decision.

The snippets below show how 4 Pentaho customers have answered these questions.

ZipRealty, a well known real estate firm, wanted to increase the quality and quantity of their reports to their users. Their previous BI solution was cost-prohibitive when it came to rolling out these reports to “all” their agents and district managers. ZipRealty’s Director of Business Intelligence, Salvatore Scalisi quotes: “It wasn’t economical to add the number of users we wanted. The licensing fees became substantial.”

With Pentaho, ZipRealty was able to help its agents and managers track inventory and conversion rates. They also enhanced their client services and satisfaction by rolling out analysis to their client base, allowing them see real estate listings along with embedded analysis and map-based mash ups directly from the ZipRealty’s website.

Estalea L.P., a technology incubator with strong Java programming expertise wanted to find a similar technology-base solution to prepare “data services” for its clients’ independent BI applications. In looking for a solution that was Java base, and did not require very deep technical skills, they stated, “Pentaho was the only viable open source product, particularly in the ETL area.” Given that other Java ETL solutions are on a per user licensing model, Pentaho’s unlimited user license was a better option to them.

The simplicity and ease of use of Pentaho Data Integration, further enabled Estalea to save on costs by not hiring more expensive programmer staff. Jon Cotter, Director of Product Design and Technology at Estalea explains, “This way I can take on projects with people with less experience and move my senior people to other projects.”

For Loma Linda University Health Care, the value was mainly around user adoption. Loma Linda’s physicians, a non-technical group in the field of Business Intelligence and ETL, are now very interested to use Pentaho for their analysis. Historically, physicians are primarily Excel users. Their positive experience on the ease of use of Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition is absolutely clear in the quote by Darrin Blocker, Decision Support Analyst at Loma Linda, “Just the idea of being able to select attributes and pivot that data and get a response in seconds, versus having to send in a report request and waiting for a week was a big selling point”.

Power Costs, Inc.’s goal was to offer an analytical application to its utility customers that can help them with energy bidding process. Monthly gigabytes of data and a seven-year history of data from its customers, combined with Power Costs’ own market data was processed to build these sophisticated analysis. Pentaho Analysis fit the bill.

For the volumes of data that Power Costs needed to analyze, Pentaho’s well-integrated Data Integration and BI stack was ideal. According to David Nilsson, Power Costs Vice President of Product Strategy, Pentaho’s ETL tool was “ One of the better ones that we had seen….Most vendors’ products don’t integrate as well.” The pricing model and easy integration helped Power Costs achieve ROI in less than four months.

4 customers, 4 different business use cases. They all needed Pentaho to not only deliver the functionality they needed, but also to provide them with tools that can easily be implemented and deliver results fast. Needless to say these customers had budget constraint that could not bless them to a ½ million dollar solution! To summarize their results in a few bullets, what they got out of Pentaho was:

• Ease of use in implementation for the ETL and BI developer
• Full integration of ETL and BI to speed project cycles
• Letting business users make changes and see results fast, without having to wait for IT
• Scalability of the solution for large volumes of data
• Low cost in rolling out BI to the masses

For more information on these customers, download the white paper “Realizing the Pentaho Agile BI Opportunity: BI for the Masses and Customer Success” by Joshua Greenbaum, Principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting.

Farnaz Erfan
Product Marketing Manager
Pentaho Corporation

To read more examples of customers like Loma Linda University and Estalea experiencing success with Pentaho visit the Pentaho Customer Success webpage.

This blog was originally posted on Business Intelligence from the Swamp.