Power Costs Uses Pentaho’s Agile BI To Boost Customer Profits 
Pentaho Corp.’s BI Suite is powering an energy supply management software firm’s ability to provide its customers business intelligence and insights into the efficiency and profitability of their operations. Power Costs Inc. is using Pentaho BI’s reporting, dashboards, analytics and easy-to-implement data integration.
Pentaho Corp.’s BI Suite Enterprise Edition is powering an energy supply management software firm’s ability to provide its customers business intelligence and insights into the efficiency and profitability of their operations.
Power Costs Inc. is using Pentaho BI’s reporting, dashboards, analytics and easy-to-implement data integration. Power Costs provides asset optimization solutions to power generators and energy traders with its Generation Supply Management System. The GSMS generates and analyzes 5-10 GB of data each month for each customer.
With so much data to create, crunch and analyze, however, it was often difficult to quickly analyze data and respond to user requests for information, according to David Nilsson, Power Costs’ vice president of product management.
Pentaho’s BI Suite “allowed us to move the data closer to the end users, creating seamless collaboration, reducing time and difficulty in creating reports allowing our customers to make faster decisions that impact their business,” Nilsson said in a statement.
In particular, Nilsson noted that Pentaho’s rich data integration capabilities proved extremely valuable to Power Costs. Pentaho’s Data Integration “completely streamlined the way we interact with our business users to build data marts that enable them to create relevant reports,” Nilsson added. The Pentaho Data Integration let Power Costs move data from a transactional system to a data warehouse, where Pentaho’s other tools (Reporting, Dashboards and Analyzer) could easily provide data analysis and visualization, he added.
“The unified BI development environment enables companies like Power Costs, to take advantage of [BI] functionality within days, at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions,” said Richard Daley, Pentaho founder and CEO. Further, Pentaho’s BI Suite “was developed from the ground up as an open framework so that it could easily integrate into any project,” Daley added.
“If you don’t have data integration along with all the rest of the BI pieces, you will struggle,”
Joe Nicholson
Vice President,
Product Marketing
Pentaho
Pentaho offers a mix of free/community open source offerings, as well as its commercial Enterprise Edition.
Inside Pentaho’s “Agile BI” Approach
Power Costs’ use of Pentaho BI shows the latest example of what Pentaho officials call their “Agile BI” approach.
Pentaho’s approach to BI offers a rich and integratable BI stack, which includes OLAP, reporting, ad hoc analysis, data mining and datamart-enabling data integration capabilities. This integration-centric approach has powered a doubling of Pentaho’s BI business over last year and opened more opportunities, Joe Nicholson, Pentaho’s VP of Product Marketing told IDN.
“I’m a data integration bigot,” said Nicholson, who is a veteran of data integration giant Informatica. “So the way I see it is simple. If you don’t have data integration along with all the rest of the BI pieces, you will struggle,” he said. Put another way, Nicholson said, “A competent reporting tool will look good, but without the data integration, you simply may not be providing your business users access to all the data they need.”
With Agile BI, Pentaho is looking to apply agile principals, known from programming and SOA architectures, to the world of BI, Nicholson said. “The common thread is that projects are more about more collaboration and more iteration” and less about developers or BI analysts working in isolation to build a totally completed application.
Pentaho is designed to let business users and BI analysts better collaborate and all stay on the same page, Nicholson said. “The business user is the best person to look at the data and say this is what I want and this is wrong. Because of our focus on integration, we feel we enable the techies, the BI analysts, to work more closely with the user to get just the correct solution,” he added.
As an example of Agile BI, Nicholson points to Pentaho’s ETL, which offers plug-in based integration with other components and data sources that lets a BI team easily integrate with Pentaho’s OLAP engine, reporting module and ad hoc analyzer “This means a BI developer can actually work in real-time alongside my business users, ask them what data sources they need, and while they’re sitting at the screen simply drag and drop them into the solution.”
Under the covers, based on this baseline solution, Pentaho can also auto-create a generic metadata layer that predicts the types of business facts and dimensions users will most likely use. “This does not require anything from the developer, the BI analyst or the end user,” he added.
Pentaho also comes with more than 100 pre-built transformations for tapping major outside data sources, including all the popular databases, as well as SAP’s Business Objects, IBM’s Cognos, Informatica and others.
Agile BI Customer Profiles
Pentaho’s Agile BI approach is attracting interest from three user profiles, Nicholson added.
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Companies who now use BI—either commercial or “cobbled together” BI components (i.e. Excel, datamarts, home-grown apps, stand-alone tools). |
| “While those solutions work OK for the business side, they are killing companies in staff time and expense to maintain them,” Nicholson said. So, these users are looking for new ways they can reduce cost and complexity before they start their next BI project or build-out, he added. | |
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Companies looking to expand or start new BI projects quickly. |
| “I haven’t seen anybody in the past year tell me, ‘I want to build a data warehouse and then add in some BI.’ BI initiatives are now driven by the CFO or VP of Sales,” Nicholson told IDN. “And that means they want to get to their BI solutions in shorter timeframes” without a lot of IT preparation and architecture work." | |
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III.
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Companies who started with open source BI and/or stand-alone BI analytics, reporting tools. |
| “Open source is the number one OS or database, so companies are open to open source for BI,” Nicholson said. But, he added, customers also want a balance between BI costs and the business benefits they really want. “Budgets are always being scrutinized, especially these days, but at the same time managers are not willing to just adopt low-cost BI if it doesn’t give them the insight and analytics they need,” Nicholson told IDN. “So, often customers say things like ‘I’m tired of not having the right data, but I’m not going to spend $200,000 to get it. Can you help?’” |
