Customer: Cineca

"By embedding Pentaho Business Analytics, Cineca can provide its customers with much less complexity and more benefits. We can now deliver sophisticated views of operational data, in time, to support much sounder planning decisions. Embedding Pentaho has been such a success we are looking to expand our operations internationally."

Deployment Overview

Key Challenges

• Wanted a sustainable and easier to manage system and decided to move all BI applications from different proprietary platforms to one open source business intelligence platform.
• Needed 30 universities to agree on a new BI system to migrate their 80 BI applications and what-if scenarios to one platform.
• The internal BI research lab started a software selection to determine the best open source platform for the future development of U-GOV. The vendors evaluated included Jaspersoft, Pentaho and Talend.
• Evaluated open source vendors against a list of nine capabilities (listed under why Pentaho) – Pentaho was the clear winner.
• Between 2002 and 2009 Cineca implemented approximately 80 business intelligence modules in 30 universities that ran U-GOV, including BI software from Microstrategy or Qlikview.

Pentaho Solution

• Three-step Migration Process – All the university members of the Consortium followed the recommendation and in 2010 the migration process started in a three-step-process
• Full business analytics suite – U-GOV Planning and Controlling embeds the data access and integration, discovery, analysis and visualization capabilities of Pentaho Business Analytics Enterprise Edition.
• Flexible environment – Cineca runs Pentaho in the following environment: Operating System: Linux; Web server: Apache; J2EE Container (Tomcat/JBOSS); Database: Oracle RDBMS (in both versions: 32-bit and 64-bit with cluster supported).
• Pentaho OEM Partnership – Enrico Brighi, Head of Planning & Controlling Division at Cineca said, “Thanks to Pentaho’s open source architecture and our OEM partnership, Cineca can provide a better integration of business intelligence and analytics into U-GOV planning and controlling, thus enhancing the critical and complex information delivery process for the universities. As Pentaho Business Analytics is made up of different components, it’s easy for us to reuse or integrate single components into U-GOV on the fly, whenever needed.”
• Read additional details about Cineca’s three step migration process in the case study under Related Media

Results

• Read more about Cineca’s results embedding Pentaho Business Analytics. Read the full case study located under Related Media.
• Happy end users – The combined Pentaho and U-GOV planning and controlling solutions works exactly as promised to end users and the feedback has been so positive that Cineca plans to offer it outside of Italy.
• Better user experience - Pentaho’s open source architecture enabled Cineca to develop a better integration for U-GOV’s user authentication and authorization which ultimately resulted in a better user experience
• Trusted for high-level reporting – Cineca plans to use Pentaho Business Analytics not only for operational reporting, but also for “high level” analysis for administration managers and university leadership.
• Seamless integration – Because Pentaho and U-GOV’s modules are both developed in Java, the integration is seamless.

Why Pentaho

• Centralized product management of all BI solutions
• Service support
• Coverage of the whole BI life-cycle
• User functionality
• Cost of solution
• OLAP capabilities
• Integration capabilities
• Unlimited number of users
• Meta-data management