Customer: Kiva

"Using Pentaho and our data warehouse, it now takes about 20 minutes to break down a metric and do specific analysis to identify performance issues. In the past, similar queries would take all night"

Deployment Overview

Key Challenges

• Kiva's CFO wanted to improve the ability to manipulate, share and make data public, and to ensure the consistency and accuracy of the data.
• With plans to exceed 100 gigabytes of transactional data and event logs in 2011, and a growing set of business users, it became apparent that spreadsheets for ad hoc analytics were highly inefficient and cumbersome.
• Kiva's CTO wanted to make sure the IT team made the right technology investment, beyond just pure finances. He required technology that would be easy to maintain and scale with Kiva through the years and that would support Kiva's ambitious growth plans.
• Needed a flexible, scalable and cost-effiecteve data warehouse and reporting system that would be able to unify a variety of data sources and satisfy an equally varied number of data customers.

Pentaho Solution

• Learn more about how Kiva is using Pentaho BI in the full case study under Related Media.
• To start the project off on the right path, in the first month of the project sent two technology leads to the 4-day Pentaho BI Suite Bootcamp training class.
• Experimenting with Pentaho Data Integration to help with third-party data sources like Salesforce.com, Google Analytics and other web service providers. This approach has enabled Kiva to add complementary data quickly while continuing to develop core data structures.
• Leverages the analysis OLAP server (Mondrian) to create a self-service tool for business users. As a result, users from multiple departments can extract data from different sources and turn that data into reports without ever having to contact IT.
• Selected Pentaho BI Enterprise Edition to take advantage of professional support and product updates. They use the reporting, analysis and data integration capabilities of Pentaho BI.
• Using reporting, Kiva is now able to deliver statistical information, such as daily loan volume, from the data warehouse back to the production web site delivered via a newly developed API.

Results

• Innovation -- Kiva's IT team is adopting an Agile BI and real-time data flow approach based on the Pentaho BI technology.
• Self-Service Automation -- The microlender has gone from a spread-mart environment where each department had different numbers with disparate data sources, to being able to validate and publicize numbers company-wide.
• Immediate Payback -- Kiva believes the return on investment with Pentaho has been almost immediate.
• Empowered Business Users -- With business users now able to create their own reports, Kiva's engineering team is able to focus on the heavy lifting its web site requires rather than building custom reports.
• Transformative -- Kiva now has access to analytical tools that have turned their employees into true knowledge workers.
• Additional details about Kiva.org success can be found in the full case study under Related Media.

Why Pentaho

• Business user friendly
• Flexible and scalable platform
• Cost effective
• Excellent reporting capability