North America's Largest Family Run Four-Season Resort Company Moves from Crystal Reports to Pentaho Dashboards with Google Maps

Orlando, FL. – June 26, 2007 — Pentaho Corp., creator of the world's most popular open source business intelligence (BI) suite, today announced that Boyne USA Resorts has deployed Pentaho for business intelligence. The new application provides visibility through interactive dashboards, reporting, and analysis to employees at all levels within the company.

Boyne USA Resorts, a Michigan-based corporation, is the largest family run four-season resort company in North America. Founded in 1947, Boyne USA Resorts now owns and/or operates numerous mountain and golf resorts throughout the United States and Canada.

The marketing team at Boyne wanted to understand customer behavior and customer loyalty to most effectively use marketing and advertising dollars to drive revenue. To achieve this, the BI team at Boyne put together an integrated, interactive dashboard using AJAX-enabled Pentaho Dashboards integrated with Google Maps to visualize customer information. The integrated dashboard shows Boyne's Top 50 Customers grouped by city and state. Color-coded pins show the concentration of top customers in any given city, allowing business users to get immediate visibility into local market activity. When business users click on a given city, a pie chart shows total time spent at different resorts for customers in that city. Together, this information gives marketers key insight into which local markets to target, and what mix of resorts and products to promote in those areas. This application was created using the Pentaho Open BI Suite in only half a day, demonstrating the flexibility and deployability of the Pentaho platform. Another dashboard visually shows customer loyalty points accumulation by geography.

The Boyne USA Resorts food and beverage team also uses Pentaho Dashboards to track and understand sales and profitability. A Pentaho Dashboard provides immediate visibility into sales, labor utilization, and profit. This information can be viewed at the resort level, and also within the individual food and beverage outlets within the resort. Every dashboard links with context to an OLAP analysis view in Pentaho Analysis Services, so that business users can explore and analyze the data in more detail.

The application accesses a data warehouse that integrates information from multiple operational systems including lodging, lift ticket, tee time and food and beverage sales systems. Boyne runs Pentaho on a Microsoft Windows server, with a Microsoft SQL Server database, using the JBoss Application Server. The warehouse is updated multiple times per hour during the workday, to give business users the most current view into operational performance. The legacy reporting environment had been delivered using Crystal Reports from Business Objects. Boyne considered multiple open source and proprietary alternatives before ultimately choosing the Pentaho Open BI Suite with professional support from Pentaho.

"We've advanced a major step forward for our business users by leveraging Pentaho," said Noah Meister, who manages the BI deployment for Boyne Resorts. "Boyne has a long history of being first and pursuing innovative ideas, and implementing a fully functioning business intelligence application across our network of resorts follows that tradition. With professional support and a comprehensive BI offering from Pentaho, we've significantly upgraded our functional capabilities for a fraction of the cost of proprietary alternatives."

"We're pleased to add Boyne USA Resorts as a Pentaho customer," said Lance Walter, VP of Marketing and Pentaho. "Business-focused IT organizations like Boyne are really showing how moving to open source BI can enhance what they deliver to their users while reducing the costs and risks associated with traditional proprietary BI."

About Pentaho

Pentaho provides a full spectrum of open source Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities including reporting, analysis, dashboards, data mining, data integration, and a BI platform that have made it the world's most popular open source BI suite. Formed by a highly experienced team of industry veterans, Pentaho's mission is to bring innovative, high quality technology and professional support to the BI market. Pentaho uses a revolutionary approach to development, distribution and support made possible by an open source business model. Pentaho is the primary sponsor and owner of popular open source projects including Mondrian, JFreeReport, Kettle, and Weka, Pentaho's technologies support a wide range of business initiatives from sales and profitability analysis, customer analysis, HR reporting, Financial reporting, KPI dashboards, Supply Chain analytics, and operational reporting.