Pentaho OEM Facilitates Change at Belgium’s Social Welfare Organizations

Cipal’s Cloud application embeds Pentaho BI to help Belgian municipalities monitor and measure performance

Geel, Belgium - Pentaho Corporation, the leading independent Business Intelligence and Analytics company, today announced that Cipal, an IT service provider to Belgium’s public sector, has completed a successful pilot of its Pentaho-based OEM application ‘Athena BI’ with four social welfare organizations in the Flanders region.

Athena BI is hosted and deployed over a Cloud computing infrastructure making it fast, easy and economical for more of Belgium’s municipalities to adopt and use the application. Many are expected to do so because Belgium will enact new legislation in 2014 requiring municipal organizations to publicly declare their policy objectives and their action plans to meet them through key performance indicators (KPIs). This means that municipalities will need BI software to help measure their ongoing performance and provide citizens with progress reports.

Following an exhaustive review of traditional and open source BI options, Cipal chose Pentaho BI Enterprise Edition to power Athena BI. Cipal is implementing the full Pentaho BI suite, which includes data integration, dashboards, reporting, analysis and data mining. Cipal chose Pentaho for Athena BI because it offered the widest range of fully integrated modules, the best total cost of ownership and flexible infrastructure that supported its open, Cloud-based platform.

According to Sven Meermans, Business Development Manager, Business Intelligence, Cipal, “Pentaho BI turned out to be the ideal platform for our Cloud-based Athena BI OEM application, which we have rolled out to four social welfare associations in Flanders. Pentaho BI supports all our current needs to provide services like data integration and analytics and will support planned capabilities like data mining. Pentaho really supported our efforts to deliver Athena BI to our customers on spec, on time and on budget.”

The early results of the Athena BI pilot have exceeded Cipal’s expectations and feedback from social welfare organizations is very encouraging. These include:

- Rapid time-to-value– The Athena BI pilot was completed and rolled out within budget to four social welfare associations in just four months.
- Power to the user– Human Resource managers are now empowered to create, customize and analyze their own reports on their own time, without reliance on IT.
- A step towards change– After the success of the pilot project with Human Resources data, Athena BI will now be rolled out to more social welfare associations, municipalities and provinces adding new functionality to monitor financial and other data.

Read more about the benefits and results of Cipal embedding Pentaho BI in the full case study.

Mathias Vaes, Quality Coordinator, Mechelen social welfare organization commented: “The Athena BI pilot is off to a great start and we’re particularly pleased with the analytics module, the ability to create custom dashboards and ease of use. We predict Athena BI will provide significant value over the long-term in being able to monitor, measure and transparently report how we’re performing against our stated objectives and also in comparison to other social welfare associations.”

Davy Nys, Vice President, EMEA and APAC, Pentaho, said: “Cipal’s Athena BI pilot highlights the enormous momentum we are seeing in the OEM channel this year as partners explore the many ways in which Pentaho’s BI products and development services help bring new custom applications to market across a wide range of industries. We are proud to have been part of the Athena BI project, which is pioneering a new approach to performance management in the public sector that may inspire other governments in Europe.”

Read the full Cipal case study at http://www.pentaho.com/about/customers/cipal/

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About Cipal

Cipal is an information and communications technology (ICT) provider based in Geel, Belgium. For more than 30 years, Cipal has been serving public sector and public institutions in the Flanders region, supporting them to run efficient services, by offering innovative and reliable ICT and e-Gov solutions and services on a quality driven and cost covering basis. Cipal has a unique structure in Flanders, being the only public ICT company, anchored in Flanders, owned and controlled by local and provincial governments. Although Cipal has 203 government stakeholders, it is it is completely self-supporting.

http://www.cipal.be/

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About Pentaho Corporation

Pentaho is reinventing business intelligence by introducing an agile approach that makes it faster, simpler and more cost effective to create reports, dashboards and analytics. For a free evaluation download Pentaho BI at www.pentaho.com/download.