Customer: Ice.com

"Open source backed by a support model is getting your cake and eating it too. As a company in the top 250 Internet retailers, I’d be foolish to not have support of some sort."

Deployment Overview

• The company had multiple team members spending time pulling reports from three different systems, such as Taurus, a shipping solution, and Excel to gather details for needed reports. Ice.com wanted to speed up and simplify this process.
• Ice.com needed to improve operational excellence and accuracy of data. The CFO, who was having a hard time accessing consistent data, would pull one number, while the CMO would pull another – both these numbers would be different than month-end numbers.
• Almost 11 years after the company was founded in 1999, Ice.com hired a new CIO to reset the company’s IT staff and architecture in one year, including rolling out new business analytics, CMS, ERP and cloud systems.

• Open source technology platform including Amazon Web Services, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss EAP, MySQL, Pentaho Business Analytics.
• Pentaho Business Analytics using the data integration (Kettle) and reporting capabilities. Planning to rollout dashboards in near future.

• Ease-of-use and real-time access to data is an eye opener for the team, allowing them to make quick decisions and be more proactive.
• In the past, only two people were able to pull reports for the team; now 15 team members -- from accounting, merchandising, fulfillment and IT -- are able to access consistent data with Pentaho and receive automated reports.
• Accessing and analyzing information in real time has given the company a competitive advantage; before the implementation, Ice.com was always several steps behind its data. One example is viewing and analyzing statistics on advertising and marketing campaigns in real time and being able to adjust the campaigns as needed to maximize exposure, instead of waiting to see if a campaign did or did not work after the money was spent.

Why Pentaho

• Professional support
• Cost effective
• Open source – Ice.com likes the ability to look under the hood and not be held hostage to fix a patch
• Ability to scale with future company growth