Customer: Pharos Resources

"We would be dead in the water without services. Getting an initial consulting and education helped us not only to get up and running pretty rapidly, but also to gain the confidence we needed to have on the full power behind Pentaho. We can easily say that having an initial architecture discussion allowed us to go to market 3 months ahead of schedule."

Deployment Overview

Key Challenges

• Build vs. Buy – a lean team Pharos knew that building technology of Pentaho’s caliber needed a lot more time and staff. Estimated the job would require 1 developer and roughly 18 months.
• In-house script did not catch bad or dirty data.
• In-house data integration and analytics was limited and did not provide insight and drill-thru capability to the data behind numbers.
• End users – such as school administrators and support staff - wanted to see student data by ethnicity, ACT/SAT scores, disability, GPA, financial aid grants, major and religious affiliation (important for parochial schools).

Pentaho Solution

• Pentaho Business Analytics including Pentaho Data Integration for back end data preparation and staging. End users enjoy the reporting, analysis and dashboard capabilities.
• Technology platform includes PostgresSQL for database and Linux operating system.
• Pentaho consulting services delivered by OpenBI at the start of their project.
• Pentaho OEM Partnership

Time to Market

• 4 weeks with ½ of a full-time developer

Results

• Pentaho Data Integration has helped profile client data very fast to show a rapid proof of concept, and in turn helping Pharos win new business.
• With new analytics, Pharos has leapfrogged competitors and expanded into new markets, building close partnerships with leading consulting firms.
• Providing ‘retention intelligence’ to universities and higher education colleges, helping them measure retention and students graduation vs. student enrollment.
• Eliminated 200 man-hours for internal IT resources that would otherwise be spent on developing report changes for clients.
• 25% revenue growth with the added module. Pharos core product – Pharos 360 – has also become a higher-value product.
• Customer ROI has increased. It only takes 24-48 hours for new clients to get up and running with Pentaho – rebranded as Pharos Insight.

Why Pentaho

• A true business partner - Pentaho’s understanding of Pharos’ initial state of business and willingness to partner and grow.
• Powerful ETL – a differentiator and ‘deal maker’
• Easy to use end user tools – the drag and drop features could easily embed into their product and usable by non-technical users with little to no guidance.
• Total value – compared to proprietary and open source BI vendors, Pharos believed that Pentaho offered the most amount of technology for the money.