InfoCamere Prepares for Economic Trends With Data

Through its ongoing commitment to technological innovation and services, InfoCamere seeks to strengthen the role of the Chambers as a driving force for local economic growth, one that improves the efficiencies of how public administrative bodies deal with business.

In Italy, Chambers of Commerce play a vital role in providing administrative support for businesses across all industry sectors. One example is helping new companies set up and maintain their presences on the Italian Companies Register. The data from the Companies Register is very useful for forecasting economic trends at the local and regional level. For example, they can predict an economic upturn by analyzing the number of new companies in a region. Being able to analyze this data in real time enables the Chambers and regional administrations to prepare adequately for both growth and downturn scenarios.

InfoCamere had used business intelligence (BI) applications both global and local levels. Globally, InfoCamere used a system called Movimprese to monitor and analyze data. The system aggregates data from all the Chambers every quarter and publishes a report that compares the data against previous quarters and against the same period in previous years. Locally, InfoCamere had developed BI applications for each Chamber that report on internal, operational, systems and ‘case’ data – the details of transactions between the Chambers and their business customers.

InfoCamere built the original BI applications with proprietary software, but by 2008 they decided to evaluate more modern, user-friendly, open source alternatives including Jaspersoft, Pentaho and Spagli BI. InfoCamere’s evaluation criteria included integration capabilities, speed, ease of use (interface), ad hoc reporting and OLAP capabilities. Ultimately, they selected Hitachi Vantara's Pentaho solution as the best fit.

The Solution: Pentaho Business Analytics, Pentaho Data Integration

InfoCamere migrated its proprietary business intelligence platform to Hitachi Vantara’s Pentaho Business Analytics. The company saw that Pentaho offered an opportunity to run on open source systems including Red Hat Linux, JBoss Clustering and MySQL database. InfoCamere implemented the software with local Pentaho partner, BNOVA.

InfoCamere started a step-by-step migration to Pentaho Business Analytics in March 2009. In the first step, the local BI applications were migrated to Pentaho and the local staff members of the Chambers were trained. Once the deployment was running successfully, InfoCamere migrated Movimprese to Pentaho and trained the people in charge of this report.

“Our reporting and analysis requirements are very complex on the data side but thanks to the user-friendly interface, the Chambers of Commerce can be self-sufficient with reporting in line with individual requirements. This enables each Chamber to support their local business communities efficiently and appropriately.” - Valter Pelosin, Project Manager, InfoCamere

Next, InfoCamere plans to add the Pentaho Business Analytics data mining capability to help Chambers of Commerce better predict and plan for corporate tax payments.

InfoCamere uses the following Pentaho Business Analytics components and developer tools:

• Data integration
• Workbench
• Aggregate designer
• Report designer
• Additionally, depending on the need: analysis, dashboard designer, aggregation tool, console
• Open Source Environment – InfoCamere uses an open source environment running Pentaho Business Analytics on Red Hat Linux, JBoss Clustering, and MySQL database, on two dedicated Intel dual-processor servers.

The Outcome: Forecast Economic Trends at Local and Regional Levels

InfoCamere had confidence in Hitachi Vantara’s ability to manage massive data sets. Being able to easily access and analyze over 500GB of data from the past 10 years enables the Chambers to prepare adequately for both growth and downturn scenarios. With Hitachi Vantara software, they can support local business communities efficiently and appropriately. Each Chamber of Commerce can run reports on operational data whenever needed. Currently, more than 500 users within the Chambers of Commerce use Hitachi Vantara’s Pentaho solution for reporting and analysis. Above all, the business users value the ease of use and speed, whereas the IT department values the support, technology, scalability, integration, and OLAP. The entire team values the creation of a self-service environment.

Managing massive, complex data sets – On the local level, the data set is 40GB and forecasted to grow by 10GB annually. There are five different data tables in the warehouse, the largest of which is 14GB with 34 million rows. It also contains 11 ‘fact’ tables, the largest of which has three million rows and is comprised of 64 aggregated tables. InfoCamere runs 12 different types of queries on this data.

On the global level, Movimprese data is 300GB accumulated over the last five years and predicted to grow by 80GB annually. It includes 11 fact tables, each approximately 5.5 million records with 75 aggregated tables. The analysis has 35 dimensions and very complex hierarchies.

Easy ad hoc reporting – Each Chamber of Commerce can run reports on operational data whenever needed, whether ad hoc, daily, weekly or monthly. The Movimprese reports are run quarterly.

User-friendly interface – More than 500 people, many of whom are non-IT, have been trained on the system and use it regularly. This includes three to four people within each Chamber of Commerce.

The Italian Chambers of Commerce use Pentaho to get a clear vision of the state of economy within the regions, enabling better local support during times of both crisis and opportunity. Currently 500 users within the Chambers of Commerce use Pentaho for reporting and analysis. In the future, InfoCamere plans to add Pentaho’s data mining capabilities to analyze corporate tax payments to ensure more efficient revenue collection.