Sircon Serves up SaaS Business Intelligence with Pentaho Reporting Enterprise Edition

Leading Licensing and Compliance Application Provider Saves Money via SaaS-Ready Reporting from Pentaho

Orlando, FL – March 17, 2009 – Pentaho Corp., the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence, today announced that Sircon Corporation, a leading provider of licensing and compliance applications for the insurance industry, is using Pentaho Reporting Enterprise Edition as part of its suite of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based applications to offer self-service reporting to Sircon clients. Pentaho's multi-tenant architecture allows them to support thousands of users across different organizations with a single instance of Pentaho integrated with complementary technology from Oracle and Sun. The deployment provides Sircon with rich functionality and cost-effective flexibility.

Sircon is a software and services company focused on serving the needs of the insurance industry. Sircon's solutions are aimed at reducing complexity associated with regulation and compliance. Sircon's customers include insurance carriers, agencies/brokers, individual producers (agents), education providers and state regulators. Sircon helps companies and individual agents in the insurance industry keep track of requirements needed to be compliant to sell insurance in all 50 states as well as facilitate the processing of licenses, license renewals, continuing education filing, contracting and other activities related to insurance compliance.

Sircon wanted to address multiple user scenarios for their customers. First, they needed to deliver metrics-focused reports that provided a high level, graphical view of overall transaction activity, allowing users to view the information at the monthly or weekly level. Second, users needed to be able to quickly download tabular reports in Adobe PDF or Microsoft Excel format. Finally, Sircon wanted to enable power users to create and publish their own reports, so that custom reports could be managed and delivered side-by-side with Sircon's packaged reports in a unified web application. Pentaho Reporting Enterprise Edition addressed all of these needs, and allowed Sircon to upgrade their functional capabilities while reducing their costs for embedded reporting.

"Pentaho Reporting Enterprise Edition is a great fit for our SaaS-based applications," said Gary Gummig, vice president, eGovernment solutions at Sircon Corporation. "It is functionally rich, technologically sound, and very easy to use. Pentaho has been a great partner throughout every phase of our design and deployment, helping us to quickly provide value to our customers."

Pentaho's platform architecture was designed from its inception to support large-scale, interactive, multi-tenant SaaS applications, and has become a popular choice for SaaS application providers looking to add new revenue streams and functional capabilities while avoiding the high costs and limited development flexibility of traditional proprietary embedded BI solutions.

The application serves thousands of users across 16 client states, accessing a total data volume over half a terabyte in size using the Oracle database. Pentaho Reporting Enterprise Edition is deployed with a JBoss Application Server running on a Sun UltraSPARC server using the Solaris™ operating system.

"Based on our years of experience architecting enterprise BI products, we designed the Pentaho platform to be easily embedded and customized at any level," said James Dixon, CTO at Pentaho. "This ability is fundamental within the architecture and ultimately allows our BI functionality to be delivered in any conceivable configuration, including cloud computing and multi-tenant SaaS deployments like Sircon's."

About Pentaho Corporation

Pentaho Corporation is the commercial open source alternative for Business Intelligence (BI). Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition provides comprehensive reporting, OLAP analysis, dashboards, data integration / ETL, data mining and a BI platform that have made it the world’s leading and most widely deployed commercial open source BI suite. Pentaho provides support, services, and product enhancements via an annual subscription that can lower total cost of ownership by 90% compared to traditional, proprietary BI offerings.  Since its 2004 founding as the pioneer in open source BI, Pentaho's products have been downloaded more than five million times, with production deployments at companies ranging from small organizations to The Global 2000. For more information, visit www.pentaho.com.