Customer: 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."

Deployment Overview

Key Challenges

• The Government enlisted Pentaho OEM, Cipal, to develop and pilot a BI application similar in functionality to what is normally available in private enterprise to four social welfare organizations.
• Cipal sought a BI application it could tailor and re-brand "Athena," named after the Greek goddess of wisdom.
• The new legislation for planning and reporting transparency represented a major operational and cultural change for local municipalities in Belgium and they needed company to support them in developing new systems and processes.
• A new government legislation in Belgium was enacted requiring municipalities to publicly declare policy objectives and meet KPIs by 2014.

Pentaho Solution

• Following an exhaustive review of traditional and open source BI vendors, Cipal chose Pentaho BI Enterprise Edition to embed in their Athena BI product.
• Cipal hosts Pentaho BI on a cluster of virtual machines (Redhat Linux and zLinux).
• Cipal is deploying the full range of Pentaho BI capabilities including data integration, reporting, dashboards and analysis.
• Cipal's long term plans include adding Pentaho BI's data mining capability for profiling customers who use municipal services in order to plan more efficiently and improve the experience.
• Learn more about why Cipal decided to embed Pentaho BI in the full case study located under Related Media on this page.

Results

• Read more about the benefits of Cipal embedding Pentaho BI in the case study located under Related Media.
• Knowledge transfer - Cipal is collaborating with Pentaho partner, BiSmart, to offer end user training on Athena BI.
• Rapid time-to-value - The Athena implementation was completed and rolled out within budget to four social welfare associations in just four months, including time for extensive testing and workshops with end users.
• Power to the user - HR 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. This is a major step forward in the right direction to provide long-term significant value to the Belgium government.

Why Pentaho

• Open Source technology
• Wide range of fully integrated modules
• Highly competitive total cost of ownership
• Flexible infrastructure