Managing Italian Universities More Efficiently with Business Analytics
November 9, 2011, Bologna, Italy — Pentaho, the business analytics company providing power for technologists and rapid insight for users, today announced that Cineca, an Italian university consortium and Italy's largest high-performance computing center, has embedded Pentaho into U-GOV, an integrated information system that helps to manage universities more efficiently.
Business analytics are very valuable in higher education due to the volume and range of decisions, with both political and financial impact, that universities need to make throughout the academic year related to things like student taxes, course offerings, building maintenance and human resources. To address the specific needs of universities, Cineca developed an integrated information system for higher education institutions, called U-GOV, which includes a business intelligence and analytics suite specifically designed for universities and called U-GOV Planning and Controlling. U-GOV Planning and Controlling consists of nine different integrated modules including accounting, human resources, research and student analytics, a planning and budgeting process, dashboards and key performance indicators, as well as best practices adapted to the university environment.Thirty universities currently use the software.
To make the system more sustainable and easier to manage, Cineca decided to replace all proprietary business intelligence platforms (Microstrategy and Qliktech) and standardize on a single open source business analytics platform. After an in-depth evaluation by its research lab, Cineca chose Pentaho for its integration capabilities, meta data management, OLAP capabilities, cost, user functionality, service support and centralized product management. Currently, U-GOV Planning and Controlling is in its second phase of migration and the results have been so positive already that Cineca plans to offer it beyond Italy.
Nicola Bertazzoni, Higher Education External Relations at Cineca said, "By embedding Pentaho Business Analytics, Cineca can provide its 30 U-GOV Planning and Controlling customers with much less complexity and more benefits. We can now deliver sophisticated views of operational data, in time, to support much sounder planning decisions. Embedding Pentaho has been such a success we are looking to expand our operations internationally."
Davy Nys, Regional Vice President EMEA at Pentaho, said, "Cineca's choice to embed Pentaho Business Analytics into U-GOV Planning and Controlling highlights the rising global demand we have experienced in the OEM channel this year. It is great to see that Cineca has developed an innovative and disruptive solution for universities that often struggle with obtaining the right data to underpin good decisions because sophisticated business analytics software is often out of their reach – financially and technically."
Learn more about Cineca's decision to embed Pentaho Business Ananlytics and why they are now already planning to extend their U-GOV product beyond Italy at pentaho.com/customers/59/cineca/.
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About Cineca
Cineca is a non-profit university consortium and Italy's largest high-performance computing center. It supports the scientific community's research activities through supercomputing and by developing applications such as advanced systems for data management and analysis. www.cineca.it/en
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.
