Next-gen data analysis provides better insight into students’ learning habits, enabling WebAssign to improve educational resources and boost profitability
February 14, 2012, — Delivering the future of business analytics, Pentaho Corporation today announced that WebAssign, the leading provider of powerful online instructional tools for faculty and students, has implemented Pentaho Business Analytics to capture and analyze disparate data sources involving more than five million users worldwide.
With more than 600,000 students using WebAssign’s educational materials each semester, WebAssign generates a huge amount of user data—data that must be analyzed in order to pay proper royalties to textbook publishers, as well as understand emerging trends in education that impact their student and faculty customers. The growing data load had overwhelmed WebAssign’s existing data analysis tool, leaving executives unable to analyze data for important information, such as popularity of textbooks.
As a result of deploying Pentaho Business Analytics Enterprise Edition, WebAssign has achieved unprecented visibility into their data, which is automatically aggregated from across the enterprise. WebAssign’s 140 employees easily perform drag-and-drop analysis, uncovering new trends and valuable information. With Pentaho’s best-in-class visualization features, WebAssign receives customized, automatically generated reports, and executives can visualize data in many different ways, such as creating histograms to see how much time students are spending on homework. Thanks to improved data analysis, WebAssign is gleaning valuable insights from their data that they are using to improve their business operations and help students to learn more efficiently. Pentaho also provides enhanced visibility into the company’s finances, helping to boost profitability.
“Pentaho provides the information we need to stay in business,” said John Risley, CEO at WebAssign. “By knowing exactly who our customers are, what they want, and whether they are coming back, we can improve our retention rates and maximize new opportunities. Pentaho has been really critical to our success in that regard.”
“Millions of students have used WebAssign, and within WebAssign’s mass stores of data there is a trove of information about how students are learning online and how education can be improved,” said Rosanne Saccone, CMO at Pentaho. “Pentaho Business Analytics helps WebAssign to leverage the value of their data in order to improve operations, benefitting students and teachers around the globe.”
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.
