The Swiss Colony Deploys Pentaho Business Intelligence to Help Optimize Website Merchandising Activities

Leading Catalog Company Integrates Nearly 1.5 Terabytes of data from Google, Weblogs, and Mainframe Sources to Support Effective Online Marketing

Orlando, FL – May 18, 2009 – Pentaho Corporation, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced that The Swiss Colony, one of the world’s most successful mail-order catalog and online merchandising companies, has deployed Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition. The Swiss Colony is using Pentaho to integrate massive amounts of clickstream data and web analytics to provide its marketing department greater visibility into valuable business metrics such as keyword optimization and ad spending. By marrying this information with traditional catalog sales activity data, The Swiss Colony now has a more complete view of its customers and is thus better equipped to serve their needs.

A family-owned company for over 80 years, The Swiss Colony has grown to be one of the world’s most successful mail-order catalog and online merchandising companies. Through twelve affiliated companies, they offer a wide range of merchandise that includes food gifts, furniture and home décor, apparel, collectibles and much more.

With a mandate to better understand the effectiveness of its online marketing activities, The Swiss Colony sought a business intelligence solution that would provide greater flexibility and scalability than its Microsoft Excel-based reporting system, and reduce the burden on IT to maintain hand-coded extract, transformation and load (ETL) scripts.

The Swiss Colony chose Pentaho for both its comprehensive data integration capabilities and its integrated BI reporting platform. Pentaho partner OpenBI managed the design and deployment of the business intelligence and data warehousing project, delivering a successful first phase project in just a few weeks, further partnering with The Swiss Colony to extend functionality and provide ongoing application support.

“The experts at OpenBI were able to walk in and quickly understand the complexities of our business, and how we could best apply business intelligence to address those business challenges,” said Mark Douma, Director of Internet Marketing and Operations. “Pentaho’s BI suite and top-notch professional support enabled us to deliver a successful, high-value BI solution at a much lower cost than would have been possible with the expensive, proprietary alternatives.”

Pentaho Data Integration Enterprise Edition is used to process raw clickstream data from the weblogs of 14 different eCommerce websites and integrate that information with mainframe-based sales activity data as well as Google affiliate information to identify the performance of various Internet marketing activities. The source data includes information from more than 850 million page-views, with total source data volumes of nearly 1.5 terabytes. Pentaho Reporting Enterprise Edition is used to deliver reports to its online marketing, creative, and merchandising departments, providing greater visibility into areas such as website traffic, keyword performance and revenue attribution. The application runs on Intel-based IBM servers using SUSE Linux, a Tomcat application server and a Microsoft SQL Server database.

“Companies today must deal with a staggering variety of data sources, and providing a consistent, single version of the truth across all those sources of information is one of their biggest challenges,” said Lance Walter, senior vice president of Marketing at Pentaho. “Just because organizations have huge data volumes doesn’t mean they have huge IT budgets. Pentaho has proven that our commercial open source BI solutions can address the volumes and complexity of demanding, real-world applications while reducing complexity and cost for IT.”

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