Pentaho Open Sources Big Data Capabilities to Further Fuel Widespread Adoption

Pentaho Business Analytics software and Professional Services help deliver HTK’s online CRM applications in five weeks

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.

About Pentaho, a Hitachi Group company
Pentaho, a Hitachi Group company, is a leading data integration and business analytics company with an enterprise-class, open source-based platform for diverse big data deployments. Pentaho’s unified data integration and analytics platform is comprehensive, completely embeddable and delivers governed data to power any analytics in any environment. Pentaho’s mission is to help organizations across multiple industries harness the value from all their data, including big data and IoT, enabling them to find new revenue streams, operate more efficiently, deliver outstanding service and minimize risk. Pentaho has over 15,000 product deployments and 1,500 commercial customers today including ABN-AMRO Clearing, BT, EMC, NASDAQ and Sears Holdings Corporation. For more information visit www.pentaho.com.