Pentaho Helps High-Flying Brussels Airport Land Integrated Business Intelligence

SOURCE:  Pentaho

Pentaho Corporation, the open source Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Integration leader, today announcedthat Brussels Airport has selected Pentaho BI Suite following a competitive proof-of-concept project to replace both its Oracle reporting and an IBM Extraction Transformation and Load tool.

Brussels Airport is at the heart of the modern Belgian economy housing 260 companies and employing 6,000 workers. With an existing reporting solution that no longer met their requirements and a world financial crisis looming, they began a search for a new BI solution in 2008 which could provide a more cost-efficient, single ‘information delivery platform’ to decision makers. They became interested in Pentaho after learning about its Agile BI and Data Integration capabilities from leading industry analysts at Gartner.

An extensive proof-of-concept involving IBM (Cognos), SAP (Business Objects), MicroStrategy, Information Builders and Pentaho, was set up. No single vendor totally met Brussels Airport’s wish list, which included the ability to add metadata at both technical and business layers, to report on production and data warehouses as well as to integrate with its SharePoint document management system. However, Pentaho’s ability to easily and cost-effectively provide daily snapshots from its Sybase IQ data warehouse and consistent reporting across the company proved decisive.

Eric Vanasch, ICT Service Manager for Brussels Airport, said: “Choosing Pentaho meant we could replace not just our reporting, but also our proprietary ETL tool to achieve our goal of a single Information Delivery Platform. Given we found Pentaho gives us at least 80 to 85% of the functionality of proprietary vendors, the cost savings we achieved are hugely significant at an estimated €350K+. Today, thanks to the support that Pentaho Enterprise Edition offers we can proudly state that we delivered our pilot project on target and in budget.”

Kicking off 2011, Brussels Airport will begin using the Data Integration, Analysis, Reporting and Dashboard tools included in the Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition. Four departments, finance, commercial, operations and ICT, will benefit from the Agile BI capabilities allowing greater iterative development between business user and developer. Using Pentaho, these departments will now provide daily, weekly and monthly management reporting, ad hoc analysis and dashboards replacing Excel spreadsheets and about 200 scheduled Hyperion reports. Pentaho Data Integration extracts data from databases and Excel files, approximately16GB for now, this will be extended to operational databases in the next phase, validatingand transforming data sets before uploading them into data warehouse cubes from which users can also pull ad-hoc reports.

Davy Nys, Regional Director EMEA for Pentaho, said: “It is great to see that a sophisticated organisation such as Brussels Airport chose Pentaho’s complete end-to-end BI solution over the mega-vendor ones to build an enterprise-wide information delivery platform. All that at a fraction of the proprietary cost, which is extremely relevant for any organisation looking to operate more cost-efficiently. We look forward to extending this strategic relationship in 2011 and beyond.”

About Pentaho Corporation

Pentaho Corporation is the leader in open source business intelligence (BI), Data Integration (DI), and Big Data Analytics. Thousands of global organizations deploy Pentaho software to make faster and better business decisions that positively impact their bottom lines. Pentaho provides a comprehensive BI suite that includes capabilities for Hadoop, data integration/ETL, modeling, data mining, analysis, reporting and dashboards. The Pentaho BI suite supports the company’s Agile BI initiative, which enables organizations to build BI applications more quickly, respond to business changes more easily and expedite time-to-value for up to 90% less cost than traditional BI vendors. Pentaho was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in Orlando, FL, USA. For more information, visit www.pentaho.com.

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