Capability Paper

Pentaho BI Capability Profile

InfoAxons Pentaho BI Integration Capabilities

InfoAxons Pentaho BI Integration Capabilities

Capability Paper

Challenge
Organizations are under continuous pressure to improve their business performance, cut costs and do more with less. Also they are expected to quickly launch new solutions and services to capitalize on changing business environment and capture greenfield business opportunities. Todays Knowledge Workers are also becoming more and more demanding and need business intelligence which aids their day-today work and not just few standard business reports with pre-formatted data. And they need it in the way which makes sense to them with full control of their data and how they want to analyze the data. Knowledge Worker Productivity Improvement is fast becoming one of the key drivers for BI Solutions. This is posing great challenge to IT teams in organizations today. They are expected to be innovative, deliver flexible business intelligence solutions to manage fast changing requirements and reduce costs, all at the same time.

Open Source BI: Delivering Business Value

Organizations realize that they cant meet the expectations of business, IT and end-users by building on closed source, proprietary BI products which are too expensive, rigid and complicated. Open source BI provides a viable alternative solution to meet the BI needs of todays knowledge driven organizations. By their very nature, open source BI applications are more flexible, based on open standards and less expensive to acquire, deploy and support than proprietary solutions. When correctly designed and implemented with right open source integration partner like InfoAxon, open source BI Solution will provide sustainable business benefits. Open Source BI also allows businesses to quickly deliver (or prototype) business intelligence solutions with just what they need without the need for investing in entire suite of BI Products.

InfoAxons Open Source BI Practice

InfoAxon has 10+ years of rich open source solutions delivery experience. Our focus on Open Source has resulted into InfoAxons Open Source BI Practice is aligned with following trends: Customers are looking for Solutions and not technical product implementation Flexible and Infrastructure-light BI Solutions are preferred over rigid & huge BI Suites Current generation of BI software viewed as inhibiting business change & delivery of innovative business solutions and services Move towards Open Source, SOA and alternate delivery models such as SaaS Web2.0 leading to collaborative way of working and software usage Users will look at what they already have and how they could re-use it innovatively

InfoAxon has a well defined Open Source BI Practice which is a collection of frameworks, templates, tools, methodologies, services and pre-integrated solutions resulting into customized BI Solutions for specific verticals or specific business problems.

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Capability Paper

The BI Practice ensures that the BI Solutions are well designed, architected, deployed and supported properly. The practice draws heavily from our Open Source Platforming approach wherein various open source components, frameworks and tools are preintegrated to create a unified Platform. The resulting Platform is used to create various vertical specific business solutions and services.

BI Practice
Tools & PreTechnologies designed Templates: Database &
Warehouse: Infobright , MySQL, EnterpriseDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL ETL Tools: Pentaho PDI, Talend Reporting Tools: Pentaho, BIRT, Jasper Reports KPI & Data Visualizations: ProtoViz, FusionCharts, CDF (Community Dashbaord Framework), Pentaho JFree Charts Analysis (OLAP) Tools: Mondrian Big Data Analysis: Hadoop KPI and Reporting Queries Management Dashboards Source Data Analysis Dimensional Modeling ETL Designs

Methodologies Services
'Rapid

BI' Methodology Open Source 'Platforming' Agile & Iterative Development Continous Integration Framework 'Fusion Build Framework' Use of Data Visualization & Modeling Tools Continous & Automated QA with pre-built Test Suites Project Management Frameworks and Governance

Advisory & Consulting Analysis, Design & Architecture Implementation & Deployment Support & Maintenance Training

Preintegrated Solutions
BI Portals with Rich Dashboards and Data Mashups White labeled, Multi-tenant SaaS BI Platforms Enterprise Reporting and Data Analysis Platforms Data Integration & Warehouse solution Embedded BI for corporate applications such as ERP, CRM, HRM etc. Extend your BI investments using our Data Visualization Layer

InfoAxons Open Source BI practice ensures that all the aspects of a practical BI solution are packaged together and delivered Onpremise, On-demand (cloud based SaaS offerings) or Embedded. The open source BI team at InfoAxon consists of a mix of technical and functional professionals providing technical and business insights required for providing a comprehensive BI solution. Their years of experience in executing open source BI solutions equip them with the knowledge, skills and expertise to provide the right solution. Over the years, the team has gained experience of delivering BI solutions in various domains such as Retail, Social Housing, Telecom and Professional Services.

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Capability Paper

InfoAxon Powered Pentaho

InfoAxon has over 5 years of experience in delivering customized BI Solutions by leveraging its Open Source BI Practice which ensures that BI Solutions are well designed, architected, deployed and supported properly. At InfoAxon, we have adopted and developed deep understanding on Pentaho BI platform which is one of the worlds leading Open source BI Platforms. We have rich experience in delivering customized BI Solutions using Pentaho as core BI engine. Through our multiple BI solutions implementations, our engineering teams have further customized and enhanced Pentaho with: new functionalities integration with other open source frameworks such as with Web2.0 Portal Framework, creation of multi-tenant SaaS based services such as Hosted Retail Analytics, and

Pentaho BI Platform
Pentaho provides an open source BI Platform made up of following components all managed from a central BI server Data Integration (ETL) Reporting & Dashboarding OLAP Analysis Ad-hoc analysis Data-mining

further add-ons (which we call Solution Accelerators) to streamline and fast track BI solutions development and deployment for our customers. To the end customers, this results into alternative, innovative & cost- effective BI Solutions that meet their needs as opposed to traditional BI systems that come with rigid, large footprints and require big budgets to implement. Also, since we already have repository of pre-built, pre-integrated and pre-tested BI solutions which caters to most of the common BI scenarios, considerably less effort is required to implement and maintain BI solutions for the customers resulting into faster turnaround and lower TCO.
Data Integration & Warehouse PDI: Kettle ETL, Spoon, Kitchen Pentaho Workbench for OLAP cubes schema design Metadata layer design for Ad-hoc Analysis Data Warehouse and Data Mart construction

Reporting

Dashboards

Analysis

CDA (Community Data access) layer Pentaho Report Designer Adhoc reports Action Sequence Report Scheduling & Bursting Alerts & Notifications

Community Dashboard Framework (CDF) JFree Charts KPI enabled Dasboard

Mondrian Designing of Cube MDX & jPivot

InfoAxons Pentaho Expertise

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Our Pentaho Services

Open source has emerged as a highly attractive model to drive business intelligence from organization data. Our experience and research however indicates that businesses adopting open source BI struggle to reach faster business benefits and timely implementations. This is because: 1. When adopted just as a technology initiative, end users expectations remain unmet. 2. Learning curve on open source BI tools and related methodologies gets stretched 3. Often a committed, trusted Open source SI vendor is needed to see it all through As India's FIRST Open Source Integration Company we bring predictability by ensuring that customers BI solution is correctly designed, architected and delivered either as on-premise, cloud-based / SaaS Service, or embedded. InfoAxons Open Source BI Practice has resulted into a set of services which can be delivered in quick-time-to-market manner providing customized BI solutions powered by Pentaho. These services are different from a traditional BI vendor services. The focus is more on providing a practical BI Solution through integration and packaging of professional BI frameworks, tools and technologies rather than just BI product/technology deployment. InfoAxon provides following BI Solutioning Services powered by Pentaho:

Pentaho Integration & Development

This focused professional services engagement is meant for customers who are looking for: implementing a Pentaho based BI Solution migrating from their existing ad-hoc BI systems in place such as Excel Sheets or Other expensive and rigid proprietary BI products establishing an automated Data Integration process and Data Warehouse a credible partner with end-to-end BI solution envisioning and implementation capabilities InfoAxon will assess your existing IT and business environment, understand your BI solution vision, recommend a roadmap for an iterative BI solution deployment and finally implement the solution as a Solution Partner with shared ownership of the BI solution roadmap. Our Open Source BI Practice and existing Pentaho based implementations have resulted into development of BI Solution Accelerators which help Rapid Development and Deployment of Pentaho based BI Solution. These accelerators ensure quick turnaround of BI Solution with a proper BI environment set-up for BI content development and further enhancements.

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Capability Paper

BI Advisory & Consulting

Readiness Assesment Solution Envisioning Protoype Planning

Analysis, Design & Architecture

Define KPIs Identify & Analyze Data Source Dimensional Modeling Data Integration & Analysis Dashboard and Report Design BI Solution Design & Architecture

Implementation & Deployment

Development Enhancement Integration Setup & Deployment Tuning & Performance Enhancements

Pentaho Integration & Development Services

Some of these Open Source BI Solution Accelerators developed by InfoAxon Open Source BI Practice Team are: Advanced Logging, Audit and Compliance Tool Kit to ensure transparent, optimized & manageable data load behavior while building your DW. The tool kit ensures ETL and data load behavior faster and more transparent. Integrated Agile Development Environment to fast track your Pentaho BI Solution development & deployment. It provides an innovative agile development environment that supports continuous integration with Pentaho projects. Integrated Workbench Integrated Portal Environment that provides a front-end BI portal with rich visualization to business users. Business users could personalize the BI Portal further to view specific KPIs, reports, analytics and Mashups with data coming from other 3 rd Party applications. Integrated CAS Framework that allows Single-Sign-On (SSO) for the Integrated Portal environment i.e. with Portal as well as reporting engine. Rich Visualization Tools such as Protovis, CDF (Community Dashboard Framework), FusionCharts that allows rich presentation of data and metrics in form of interactive reports, charts, dials, maps etc. REST based Service Layer that enables easier integration with other frameworks / technologies.

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Capability Paper

Pentaho Managed Services

This professional engagement is meant for customers who have either experimented with Pentahos community or enterprise editions for POC / departmental implementations but are struggling to: Realize full value offered by Pentaho as a end-to-end BI Platform Get Pentaho based BI solution well adopted or institutionalized within their organization Resolve scalability, performance and other technical issues faced on Production environment Integrate other corporate applications or data sources for innovative solutions / services

Adoption & Optimization

Examine Design & Architecture Production Environment Planning Create a unified BI Solution Stack for optimum performance

Support & Maintenence

BI Solution Stack Support Bug Fixing Corrective Maintenence

Open Source Model provides easy access to various downloadable software applications. Users with IT backgrounds are able to quickly download and set-up open source BI applications as demos or departmental / team level implementations. However as and when these application starts getting used as a BI solution, the end-user experience starts deteriorating. BI Solution requires careful design & architecture planning, sound integration and above all optimization for enterprise wide usage in terms of no. of users, scalability, security and performance. InfoAxons Managed BI Services are aimed at helping customers reach next level of their BI implementations from basic (in terms of POCs, departmental / team level) implementations to fully optimized production grade BI solutions which are well supported and enhanced continuously. As an open source contributor, InfoAxon has helped raise and solve several bugs in Pentaho BI community. These contributions range from: Testing of Pentaho Releases to identify and report bugs and issues to Pentaho. Some of the areas where InfoAxon has significantly raised bugs and issues are: Pentaho Data Integration, Mondrian OLAP Integration of CAS (Single Sign on framework) with Pentaho-Liferay Framework. For this several enhancements were carried out in default CAS setup shipped with Pentaho. Integration of CDE (Community Dashboard Editor) and CDF (Community Dashboard Framework) with Pentaho Enterprise Version.

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Capability Paper

Extending BI Investment with components from our Open Source BI Stack:

InfoAxons approach is to help customers re-use what they already have and provide a flexible BI Solution rather trying to force a one-size-fits-all mentality. Based on Open Standards, our solutions are designed to leverage your existing BI Infrastructure - applications, databases / data marts / data warehouse, ETL tools, BPM engine etc. wherever it makes sense. Plug on just the components required from our open source BI Stack with your existing BI infrastructure to complete your BI solution and reduce costs. Some of the specific BI components being used by our customers as part of their Hybrid BI Solution Strategy: 1. Data Visualization Layer (Dashboard, Reporting & Analysis) 2. Data Integration with ETL tools 3. MySQL / PostgreSQL / EnterpriseDB / Infobright based Data Warehouse 4. Integration with External BPM Engine

Pentaho Training
The success of business intelligence solution implementation depends upon how well it is adopted within the organization and empowering various stake holders (end users, administrators, developers) with the ability to perform their task better. InfoAxon creates value by ensuring success of BI initiative by providing practical know-hows and actionable knowledge in form of Training Services. These Training Services cover BI Solution & Data Integration using Pentaho BI Platform and InfoAxons Agile & Iterative solution development methodology. InfoAxon Training covers: Business Users Training Administrator Training Developer Training The above training packages ensure better alignment and adoption of BI by stakeholders of the BI Solution (viz. business and IT users) by addressing their needs of: Ease of use Rapid development & deployment of BI content (reports, analysis, dashboards etc.)

Use of Pivot Table to Slice & dice drill through data Ad-hoc Analysis and Reporting

Pentaho BI Platform configuration and administration Pentaho Design Studio Action Sequences Publishing BI Content to BI Server

Business User Training

BI Administrator Training

BI Solution Development Reporting & Analysis Dimensional Data Modeling Data Integration (ETL) & Data Warehouse construction MDX & JPivot Workflows OLAP Cubes using Cube Designer / Workbench

BI Developer Training
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Capability Paper

Pre-Integrated Pentaho Solution

Our BI Practice and existing Pentaho based implementations have led to development of our flagship BI Platform fusionBI which is a pre-integrated BI platform powered by Pentaho and other open source technologies. It is a sum result of our open source integration effort over the years and acts as a mothership platform on which collaborative Business Intelligence and reporting solutions are developed for our customers.

fusionBI helps jumpstart specific open source business intelligence solutions by providing an integrated stack that can be used to deliver solutions faster. It is used to develop vertical specific and customized BI solutions that are frequently requested by organizations considering BI. Some of these pre-integrated solutions are: 1. BI Portals with Rich Dashboards and Data Mashups 2. White labeled, Multi-tenant SaaS BI Platforms 3. Enterprise Reporting and Data Analysis Platforms 4. Data Integration & Warehouse Solutions 5. Embedded BI for corporate applications such as ERP, CRM, HRM etc. www.infoaxon.com

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BI Portal Solution with Rich Dashboards & Data Mash-ups:

Decision makers at the top of any business are looking for a real time self updated Dashboard view of their business that outlines key performance indicators and business progress in form of metrics simply through visual and interactive means such as charts, dials, maps etc. InfoAxon has further enhanced Pentaho by integrating it with leading web2.0 collaborative Portal framework Liferay which provides multi-tenant and collaborative capabilities to the BI Solution. Further integration with rich visualization toolkits such as Protovis, CDF (Community Dashboard Framework), FusionCharts ensures that Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and other business metrics gets represented in an interactive, innovative and appealing way.

The Portal environment provides business users capabilities to determine the information they require and personalize the look and feel and the format in which the information is delivered. The fact that the BI Portal is based on open standards, it allows different types of data to be captured from different sources and mash-up to create new content. The portal based BI solution allows users to create business intelligence Dashboards with Data Mash-ups from operational BI systems (Pentaho) and information from other applications / sources in form of data, audio, graphics, video and reports and present a comprehensive view. It also allows users to create their own ad-hoc BI content using the various applications that have been integrated into the solution. The Solution provides unified administration and security with CAS integration leading to single-sign-on.

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Capability Paper

Integrated Dashboard, Analysis and Reports:

Users could carry out rich graphical analysis for visual representation of complex information. They could select from wide range of graphical displays including indicators, dials, charts and gauges, making it easier to spot trends and understanding the key factors driving business.

Users could just point-and-click to instantly summarize their performance metrics, operational data and create dynamic, customized reports to meet the entire spectrum of their reporting needs without any programming or IT expertise.

The solution allows multidimensional analysis on cubes to explore large volume of summarized data through an interactive analysis with slice and dice, drill down and drill through options providing flexibility to have multiple views of data and information from different perspective.The integrated BI Portal solution is used by our customers as: Vertical specific, multi-tenant SaaS BI solutions for customers customers BI Intranets with rich executive dashboards and data mash-ups by businesses Departmental Level BI Websites Re-use existing BI infrastructure of the customer with our rich Portal based Data Visualization

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Capability Paper

Data Integration & Warehouse Solution:

Our Data integration and Data warehouse solutions help businesses create a Single Source and Version of Truth within their business. The key problems are that a business collects data at different sources and business users do not have a consistent and consolidated view of the data that can then be explored and mined to provide business insights.

This is achieved through various techniques and tools powered by Open source such as: Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) Kettle ETL CDE (Community Data Extraction) Mondrian OLAP MDX with jPivot Talend

What Problems we solve

Creating a Data warehouse & Data Marts as part of any Business Intelligence implementation Enhancing existing Data stores by integrating data from various sources Migrate Data between different applications and using ETL techniques to transfer the data Conversion of data through imports of data into databases from text-files, Excel spreadsheets, relational systems. Presenting Data as a service to other applications within the Business www.infoaxon.com

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What we do
Designing Business Data Models (Defines a picture of how the business data will be represented and accessed by any application looking for business insights) Identification of different data sources for data integration and warehouse development. ETL (Extract , Transform and Load) tools to connect disparate data sources and load the data according to the business data models. Access Control and security design for the data in the data warehouse Data warehouse management and support

How we do
Identification of Data sources scattered disparately within the business Use of Open source tools such as Pentaho, Kettle, Talend to perform ETL operations Data analysis to develop consistency check rules during ETL Data cleaning and Data profiling to make sure data is clean and consistent with business requirements Implement security and authentication rules Documentation of each step to help Data administrators

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Why InfoAxon for your Pentaho based BI Solution

InfoAxon has over a decade experience of working with and contributing to open source eco-system. Our open source expertise range from open source consulting, development, enhancements to integration of open source components / frameworks to create Business Solution Platforms through our unique opens source Platforming approach. Our Open Source BI Practice does not view Pentaho just as a piece of technology; rather we view it from creating innovative BI Solutions for our customer needs. The BI practice ensures that the Pentaho based BI Solution is properly designed, architected, integrated and deployed with right support and governance mechanisms. We have enhanced and customized Pentaho with new features, innovative integration with other 3 rd party framework & components and developed further add-ons Solution Accelerators to standardize and fast-track BI Solutions implementations. Some of our differentiators as compared to any other Pentaho deployment vendor:

Pentaho customization approach (adopted by any other Open source vendor) Open Source Yes

Comments

InfoAxon innovative prepackaged Pentaho Platform approach

Comments

Pentaho is open source and provides the usual benefits of using open source software

Yes

We have many more open source components well integrated other than Pentaho. These open source components can be customized further to make the stack "Business Ready" for Pentaho users Solutions that are good value for money since they offer much more than what you get from a basic Pentaho implementation; Pre-packaged suites lowers your total cost of ownership and fast track project implementations Dedicated Open Source BI Practice resulting into customized and faster BI Solutions for specific verticals or specific business problems

Cost

Yes

Traditional benefits of adopting open source. You can avail either free or commercial open source versions of Pentaho

Affordable implementation (much more value for money)

Open Source BI Practice

No

Most of the vendors have just Pentaho specific skills. This approach is just to implement Pentaho as a technology product and not create & own BI Solution.

Yes

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Rich Dashboards

No

Not provided by Pentaho by default and for many projects require significant customization

Rich Dashboards available for implementation

Uses other integrated open source software to provide rich and attractive dashboards

Test Suite

No

When implementing projects no additional standard test cases and test plan suites are available tuned for Pentaho

Typical Test cases and Test plan for Pentaho project part of Platform development

When implementing projects you get ready test cases and test plans

Business Ready

No

Pentaho out of the box still needs a lot of customization and understanding to be put into production

Yes

Integrated stack makes it easier to put into production and leads to faster turnaround times

Making your development faster and Agile

No

Does not provide a development environment that fast tracks your project development; Mostly this is developed by project teams

Innovative and Agile development environment

You get an innovative and agile development environemnt that supports continuous integration on our Pentaho projects

High Performance optimized Data Access Layer Better Data Load Behaviours

No

The data access layer for production grade volumes is often needed to be modified and optimized but takes time to get right Standard ETL capabilities (nothing special that will make your ETL process data load behaviour faster)

Enhanced data access layer compared to Pentaho

Pentaho layer is optimized for business use and cuts down the "Problem Finding" and fixing loops; In summary saves you time

No

Advanced Logging, audit and compliance is built in the fusionBI tool kit and the data load behaviour while building your DW will be more manageable and transparent

For example missing data loading later;

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About InfoAxon Technologies

InfoAxon is a leading provider of enterprise services and business solutions powered by open source. We design, architect and support complete Enterprise Solution Platforms using Open Standards, Web 2.0 next generation technologies and Open Source Frameworks providing end-to-end solutions to business problems. Indias First Global Open Source Integration Company We are India's First Global Open Source Integration Company providing business solutions in areas of Content & Knowledge Management, Web2.0 Collaboration and Business Intelligence powered by our unique open source Platforming expertise.

INDIA OFFICE:
InfoAxon Technologies Ltd. H-189, Sector-63, Electronic City, NODIA-201307, U.P India Phone:+91 120 4350040, Fax:+ 91 120 4350065

UK OFFICE:
InfoAxon Technologies UK Ltd. Building A, Trinity Court, Wokingham Road, Bracknell, Berkshire RG42 1PL, United Kingdom Phone: +44 1344 668048, Fax: +44 1344 668148

Website: www.infoaxon.com | Blog: http://blog.infoaxon.com | E-mail: contactus@infoaxon.com