HTK expands its Horizons with Pentaho

London — January 18, 2012 — Building the future of business analytics, Pentaho Corporation, announced today that its UK customer HTK launched two new editions of its CRM software this week following an OEM agreement between the two companies.  In just five weeks time Pentaho’s European Professional Services Group teamed up with partner Systems Integrator Xpand IT to fully integrate Pentaho Business Analytics into HTK’s Horizon CRM application.  These new online software-as-a-service (SaaS) editions of its CRM application – HTK Horizon ‘Lite’ and ‘Professional’ are aimed at the small and medium-sized business (SMB) market, opening up new commercial opportunities for HTK. Both editions will be available from today on the HTK Horizon Website http://www.htkhorizon.com/.

Marketing professionals who buy SaaS applications expect software with low barriers to entry on both usability and price.  It is vital that these customers are able to get up and running on their own from the minute they sign up to the service, especially as HTK offers a free 30 day trial of the software.  Secondly, because they are used to the speed of searching online, customers expect answers to queries on data to be returned very fast.  Finally, they need to be able to create ad-hoc reports for the many different campaigns and audiences they serve. 

These customer expectations presented major development implications for HTK, who ultimately selected Pentaho Business Analytics  for:

• Modern and embeddable end-to-end software platform;
• Ability to quickly analyse large volumes of historical data;
• Cost and development advantages thanks to the Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) licensing model
• Flexible, customisable reporting with highly professional, attractive interface designs out-of-the-box
• Extract / Transfer / Load (ETL) capabilities to migrate customer data into its data warehouse

The new online SaaS applications build upon HTK’s excellent track record in large enterprise and the public sector. Capabilities enabled by Pentaho include:

• Flexible, ad-hoc reporting and dashboards so marketing professionals can slice, dice and present their multi-channel data depending on specific campaign requirements
• Attractive 3-dimensional charts that render on an iPad, which is critical for marketing professionals
• Ability for HTK migrate customer data in near real-time into its data warehouse.

Justin Bowser, Managing Director, HTK Online said, “It was important to our customers that reports looked professional and polished, they could be self-sufficient and that they could perform analysis quickly. With a SaaS product, people don’t expect to wait more than a couple of seconds. Our brief was essentially to deliver great looking reports that ran fast and we’re there - so it’s looking good!”

Davy Nys, Vice President, EMEA & APAC, Pentaho said, “HTK’s implementation perfectly illustrates the significant potential for OEMs to deliver new SaaS applications in the Cloud by embedding our business analytics software and tapping into our professional services capabilities. “

• Read the full HTK case study at www.pentaho.com/customers/65/htk/
• Learn about the advantages of embedding analytics into your application at www.pentaho.com/explore/embedded-bi/
• Pentaho is hiring in Europe. Learn more about open positions in sales and services at www.pentaho.com/careers/

About HTK

Founded in 1996 and privately owned, HTK has historically developed CRM applications and web/email/SMS/voice automation services for large enterprises and public sector organisations.  Past projects include building the UK’s first electoral voting by interactive voice response (IVR), government ‘warn and inform’ systems classified as critical national infrastructure and information lines for TV’s Big Brother.  Today HTK serves the small and medium-sized business community with ‘Lite’ and ‘Professional’ versions of its HTK Horizon software, in addition to its enterprise customers. To support its customers’ significant data storage requirements, HTK manages two UK data centres.