Non-Profit Micro-Lender Adopts Agile BI Approach To Make Real-Time, Data-Driven Business Decisions
September 7, 2011, — Pentaho, a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced that Kiva, the non-profit personal micro-lending platform, has adopted Pentaho BI Enterprise Edition to automate its reporting and analytical capabilities. Kiva has gone from a "spread-mart" environment where each department had different views of disparate data sources, to being able to validate and publicize numbers company-wide.
Since its founding in 2005, Kiva has rapidly grown and made possible over $225 million in microloans between individual lenders and borrowers all around the world. To keep pace with increasing demand for its service, Kiva realized it needed a flexible, scalable and cost-effective data warehouse and reporting system that would be able to unify a variety of data sources and satisfy an equally varied number of customers of that data.
To achieve this, the team adopted an Agile BI and real-time data flow based on Pentaho. Based on early results, Kiva believes that the return on investment with Pentaho has been almost immediate. By replacing their current solution, Kiva is already seeing payback with people outside of IT analyzing their own data and creating their own reports. This allows Kiva's engineering team to focus on the heavy lifting that its website requires, which can be significant, when on any given week average loan volume approaches $1.5 million from thousands of lenders around the world.
With access to user-friendly analytical tools, Kiva is now able to empower non-IT users to analyze performance and tracking data to make faster decisions relating to product development and customer outreach. Kiva employees are more self-sufficient in their data usage, a critical improvement when running an online microfinance organization that requires rapid, daily -- if not hourly -- decision-making.
"Using Pentaho and our data warehouse, it now takes about 20 minutes to break down a metric and do specific analysis to identify performance issues. In the past, similar queries would take all night," said Greg Allen, a business analyst at Kiva.
"Pentaho's highly interactive, easy-to-use web-based design makes it simple to create ad hoc reports and analyses without relying on developers, which is leveling the playing field for many small to medium-sized organizations just like Kiva," said Ian Fyfe, chief technology evangelist at Pentaho. "SMBs know that in order to grow their businesses, they need to be able to make decisions based on data, not guesses. Pentaho's intuitive technology does this with minimal training required, giving non-technical users the ability to visualize and analyze their data to quickly identify trends and anomalies in their business information."
Visit Pentaho.com to read the full story of how Kiva uses Pentaho to automate its reporting and analytical capabilities.
Join the Pentaho Lending Team on Kiva.org to start making an impact.
About Kiva
Kiva is a non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions, Kiva lets individuals lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world. Learn more about how it works.
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.
