Pentaho Plays to Aspiro's Musical Aspirations

Open Source Business Intelligence Key to 'Nordic iTunes,' WIMP

Orlando, FL and Oslo, Norway, April 27, 2010 – Pentaho Corporation, the open source business intelligence (BI) leader, today announced it was selected as the reporting standard for the music division of Aspiro, the largest media group in the Nordics. Aspiro uses Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition to track downloads and micro-payments for WIMP, its newly-launched online music service, which rivals iTunes and Spotify

WIMP users download an extensive range of music via PCs, iPhones and other devices in Norway, Denmark and soon across Europe. The business is entirely digital and data-driven, with music files licensed from some 20,000 sources via 15 partners and priced dynamically, according to where and how it is sold. The ability of Pentaho Enterprise Edition products to cope with large amounts of metadata across millions of music tracks was instrumental in Aspiro's decision, as it needs to create complex reports detailing how much, and to which, record companies it pays royalties.

Aspiro's senior executives realised the previous in-house system was not up to the job after attending a workshop run by Pentaho reseller CONDUCT. They then challenged CONDUCT's team to provide a stronger alternative with a Proof of Concept built on an open source technology stack including Pentaho, JBoss and MySQL.

Aspiro Music CEO, Per Einar Dybvik explained: "Our online music business, with its three million objects and a lot of metadata is very different to other services we offer, like ringtones. We needed an enterprise-level BI solution that allows us to see in detail whether a sales channel is performing or not, but our experience told us there was no advantage in traditional BI. We like open source and Pentaho was the only BI solution of this kind which we felt comfortable could deliver enterprise-level reports to the standards we require."

The pilot project with CONDUCT also confirmed that Pentaho could provide flexible 'special purpose' reports for Aspiro's partners. They can now log-in independently to view their sales performance on the WIMP platform, or to create special deals to drive demand. Now, the new solutions and reports Aspiro is able to offer their partners with Pentaho has resulted in new business opportunities worldwide.

"Before it was difficult to share reports created from dynamic analysis, but with Pentaho this is easy," states Dybvik. "In addition to our consumer service, we now plan to provide B2B settlement solutions with Pentaho reporting, for other TV distributors, Internet Service Providers and mobile operators."

Richard Daley, CEO of Pentaho said: "It is heartening to see exciting new businesses like Aspiro bypass 'Old School' Business Intelligence and opt for Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition. It is even more encouraging that the capabilities within Pentaho's solutions can create new business opportunities in emerging sectors like digital music. Such visionary customers are an inspiration for others and increasingly, they opt for the clear leader in commercial open source BI, Pentaho."

About Aspiro

Aspiro has a unique position as the world's only provider of both streaming music and TV services delivered as a complete white label service to partners. As the market leader in mobile entertainment in the Northern European region, Aspiro utilize over ten years mobile technology and retail experience, delivering its premium services to companies worldwide including T-Mobile, Telefónica O2, Telenor, 3, TeliaSonera, BBC, Thumbplay, Aftonbladet, mBlox, TVNorge, Entel and VG. Aspiro is listed on the Nasdaq OMX Stock Exchange in Stockholm, with local presence in all Nordic and Baltic countries and the US. 2009 sales were SEK 441 m and the company has some 140 employees.

About Pentaho Corporation

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