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Capability Paper Pentaho BI Capability Profile InfoAxon’s Pentaho BI Integration Capabilities InfoAxon’s Pentaho BI Integration Capabilities

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InfoAxon has 10+ years of rich open source solutions delivery experience. 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. At InfoAxon, we have adopted and developed deep understanding on Pentaho BI platform which is one of the world‟s leading Open source BI Platforms. We have rich experience in delivering customized BI Solutions using Pentaho as core BI engine.

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Page 1: Open Source BI

Capability Paper

Pentaho BI Capability Profile

InfoAxon’s Pentaho BI

Integration Capabilities

InfoAxon’s Pentaho BI Integration

Capabilities

Page 2: Open Source BI

Capability Paper

www.infoaxon.com

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.

Today‟s Knowledge Workers are also becoming more and more demanding and need business intelligence which aids their day-to-

day 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 can‟t 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 today‟s 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.

InfoAxon’s Open Source BI Practice

InfoAxon has 10+ years of rich open source solutions delivery experience. Our focus on Open Source has resulted into InfoAxon‟s

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.

Page 3: Open Source BI

Capability Paper

www.infoaxon.com

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 pre-

integrated to create a unified Platform. The resulting Platform is used to create various vertical specific business solutions and

services.

InfoAxon‟s Open Source BI practice ensures that all the aspects of a practical BI solution are packaged together and delivered On-

premise, 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.

BI PracticeTools & Technologies

• 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

Pre-designed Templates:

• KPI and Reporting Queries

• Management Dashboards

• Source Data Analysis

• Dimensional Modeling

• ETL Designs

Methodologies

• '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

Services

• Advisory & Consulting

• Analysis, Design & Architecture

• Implementation & Deployment

• Support & Maintenance

• Training

Pre-integrated 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

Page 4: Open Source BI

Capability Paper

www.infoaxon.com

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 world‟s 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

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.

InfoAxon’s Pentaho Expertise

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

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

• CDA (Community Data access) layer

• Pentaho Report Designer

• Adhoc reports

• Action Sequence

• Report Scheduling & Bursting

• Alerts & Notifications

Dashboards

•Community Dashboard Framework (CDF)

• JFree Charts

• KPI enabled Dasboard

Analysis

•Mondrian

•Designing of Cube

•MDX & jPivot

Page 5: Open Source BI

Capability Paper

www.infoaxon.com

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.

InfoAxon‟s 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.

Page 6: Open Source BI

Capability Paper

www.infoaxon.com

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 3rd

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.

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

Page 7: Open Source BI

Capability Paper

www.infoaxon.com

Pentaho Managed Services

This professional engagement is meant for customers who have either experimented with Pentaho‟s 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

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.

InfoAxon‟s 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.

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

Page 8: Open Source BI

Capability Paper

www.infoaxon.com

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

InfoAxon‟s 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 InfoAxon‟s

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

Business User Training

•Pentaho BI Platform configuration and administration

•Pentaho Design Studio

•Action Sequences

•Publishing BI Content to BI Server

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

Page 9: Open Source BI

Capability Paper

www.infoaxon.com

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.

Page 10: Open Source BI

Capability Paper

www.infoaxon.com

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.

Page 11: Open Source BI

Capability Paper

www.infoaxon.com

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 customer‟s 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

Page 12: Open Source BI

Capability Paper

www.infoaxon.com

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

Page 13: Open Source BI

Capability Paper

www.infoaxon.com

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

Page 14: Open Source BI

Capability Paper

www.infoaxon.com

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 3rd 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)

Comments InfoAxon

innovative pre-packaged Pentaho

Platform approach

Comments

Open Source

Yes 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

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)

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

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 Dedicated Open Source BI Practice resulting into customized

and faster BI Solutions for specific

verticals or specific business problems

Page 15: Open Source BI

Capability Paper

www.infoaxon.com

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

No The data access layer for production grade volumes is

often needed to be modified and optimized but takes time to

get right

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

Better Data

Load

Behaviours

No Standard ETL capabilities

(nothing special that will make

your ETL process data load behaviour faster)

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;

Page 16: Open Source BI

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

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.

India‟s 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.

Website: www.infoaxon.com | Blog: http://blog.infoaxon.com | E-mail: [email protected]