Leading Global Nutrition Company Deploys Pentaho Business Intelligence on the Amazon Cloud

Pentaho and OpenBI Deliver Cloud-based Open Source BI for Nutricia

Orlando, FL – February 10, 2009 – Pentaho Corporation, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced that Nutricia North America, a division of Group Danone, has deployed the Pentaho BI Suite in production running on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Implemented by Pentaho Certified Partner OpenBI, the application integrates data from disparate systems to provide analytical insight across Nutricia's product lines, customers, and geographies.

Nutricia, founded in 1983, provides medical nutrition to assist in the management of conditions such as milk protein allergies, genetic metabolism disorders, pediatric epilepsy, and others. Nutricia offers its products in 19 countries around the world.

Prior to the Pentaho deployment, Nutricia employees had a difficult time collecting and analyzing information across product lines, time periods and geographies. The organization wanted a way to deliver common metrics through a web-based interface and to automate manual data collection and integration tasks. The optimal solution was a system that could effectively address its business and functional needs without the unnecessary expense of traditional proprietary software licenses or the overhead of deploying the physical hardware infrastructure typically required.

With these considerations, Nutricia deployed Pentaho's commercial open source BI Suite to provide dashboard, data integration, and analysis capabilities. The solution featured standardized web-based metrics and interactive OLAP analysis to allow business users to analyze key information at any level of detail. The Pentaho experts at OpenBI were able to deliver a complete data mart and dashboard solution in under six weeks. Nutricia integrated its on-site Sage MAS90, Microsoft SQL Server data with the cloud-based implementation of Pentaho and the MySQL database on Amazon EC2. At first, Nutricia considered more traditional hosting environments, but the Amazon cloud environment offered superior flexibility in pricing, capacity, and on-demand scalability. Based on the success that they've delivered for Nutricia and other clients using Pentaho's BI suite, OpenBI has been invited to present at The Data Warehousing Institute meeting in Denver on Tuesday, February 10.

"The experts at OpenBI addressed our business requirements and were able to rapidly deliver a comprehensive and integrated solution," said Scott Grabo, Director of IS at Nutricia. "With Pentaho, MySQL, and Amazon EC2, we now have a low-cost, standards-based solution that can easily scale from both a software and hardware perspective."

"We see open source business intelligence in the cloud as a great solution for companies who want to embrace modern technologies with minimal upfront and ongoing capital expenditure," said Steve Miller, President of OpenBI. "Pentaho, MySQL, and Amazon show that enterprise-class business intelligence alternatives are available even while IT budgets are being squeezed."

Cloud-based deployment is growing in popularity among Pentaho users, and Pentaho Corporation incorporates cloud-based computing into the development process for its software. Pentaho engineers take advantage of Amazon EC2 infrastructure when developing and testing scalability features, validating architectural designs, and ensuring that Pentaho solutions can easily scale across multiple servers for cloud-based and on-premise deployments alike. Based on this research as well as customer use-cases, Matt Casters, Pentaho's Chief Architect for Data Integration has been selected to present this April at the MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, California on massively parallel data integration in The Cloud using Pentaho Data Integration, MySQL and Amazon EC2.

"As the pioneer in commercial open source business intelligence, Pentaho continues to blaze new trails and drive innovation in the market," said Richard Daley, CEO of Pentaho. "Our company, community, and customers are proving that cloud business intelligence is here today and is delivering real value in the marketplace."

About OpenBI

OpenBI, LLC is a professional services firm that specializes in the delivery of business intelligence solutions to the commercial marketplace using open source software. OpenBI's mission is to improve each customer's business performance by directing their BI investments to tangible business results. By blending the expertise of veteran BI practitioners with modern, high-quality open source technologies, OpenBI creates affordable, reliable and repeatable success for our clients. For more information, visit www.openbi.com

About Pentaho Corporation

Pentaho Media Contact