Case Studies in Brief - March 26, 2009

InfoManagement Direct, March 26, 2009

Information Management Editorial Staff

Cardiac Science Selects Pentaho to Streamline Information Integration

Cardiac Science, a leader in advanced cardiac diagnosis, resuscitation, rehabilitation and informatics products, selected Pentaho Data Integration Enterprise Edition to populate and maintain its enterprise data warehouse to provide the company's users with a consistent, unified source of information.

Cardiac Science has customers in more than 100 countries worldwide. Prior to the Pentaho deployment, accessing fundamental information across its multiple systems and data sources required constant IT involvement, creating a bottleneck in information access. Cardiac Science needed timely and accurate business information for marketing, sales, accounting and engineering quality and needed to find a smart way to archive a large, rapidly growing production database.

“We chose Pentaho after evaluating several providers," said Debbie Shapiro, data warehouse manager at Cardiac Science. "Pentaho provides the same or better functionality and more support versus the competition. They provide a lower total cost of ownership versus proprietary systems. We've been very happy with Pentaho Data Integration Enterprise Edition so far.”

Guang Dong Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine Launches IBM Health Record System

IBM announced the launch of a new suite of health care information sharing and analytics technologies at the Guang Dong Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, which combines the strengths of TCM and modern western medicine.

The first-of-a-kind system, dubbed CHAS (Clinical and Health Records Analytics and Sharing), is designed to enable the sharing of electronic medical records that incorporates TCM and MWM data across the hospital network.

“Our hospital has a long tradition of excellence, not only in medicine but in clinical research and teaching,” said Lv Yubo, president, Guang Dong Hospital of TCM. “We are committed to maintaining our exacting standards, and IBM’s CHAS technology is helping us do just that by moving us away from siloed, antiquated systems in favor of integrated, patient-centric processes.”

Centro Deploys Pentaho Business Intelligence

Centro, a leading online media services provider and technology firm, deployed Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition to integrate information from disparate systems providing ad hoc, on-demand reporting and analysis to its entire organization.

Servicing more than 450 advertisers through their respective agencies, Centro quickly outgrew its Excel-based reporting system and sought a more complete BI solution to drive better insight into operations and help steer strategic decision-making in today's challenging economic environment.

“We needed to deliver a business intelligence solution that would show immediate benefit by increasing efficiencies, containing costs, and helping drive revenue. By using Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition, we were able to do so in a fiscally responsible manner, and in today's economic climate that is of utmost importance," said Peter Schmidt, Director of Business Intelligence at Centro. "Not only have we built a solid foundation for future expansion, but we also have assistance from the actual development experts at Pentaho and its large community of users and contributors”

Kronos Improves Virtual Infrastructure Performance with Akorri BalancePoint

Kronos Incorporated, a leader in workforce management solutions, implemented Akorri’s BalancePoint software to gain visibility across virtual machines and storage, identify contention and bottlenecks, resolve performance issues and plan and manage capacity utilization.

“We initially selected BalancePoint because it gave us an immediate and active picture of the entire environment from virtual machine down through the supporting storage at the disk level,” said Michael Moran, senior IT manager for Kronos. “BalancePoint is easy to use, and we like that it’s an agentless tool. Recently, when we had a performance problem, it pinpointed contention on a particular LUN and enabled us to better organize that environment, which is something we never would have been able to do without the tool. Now we can address and prevent problems, while before we were guessing.”

Edible Blooms Grows Stronger and Sweeter With NetSuite

Edible Blooms, the fast-growing edible bouquet company that is expanding rapidly across Australia and New Zealand, is using NetSuite to power its end-to-end business operations from accounting/ERP to customer relationship management and Ecommerce.

Since going live on NetSuite in September 2008, Edible Blooms streamlined its operations significantly and gained unprecedented visibility into its business. NetSuite's on-demand, Web-based architecture has also enabled the company to move into new markets.

Edible Blooms is the brainchild of entrepreneur Kelly Baker. “My business advisor told me that if I didn't get a better IT solution, she would simply quit!” said Baker, founder and managing director. “She said it half in jest, but she was serious. Our whole premise in building this company was to do as much as possible with as few people as possible. We needed the best system out there. Once we learned about NetSuite, we realized that it was what we were looking for. It was the only way for a company like ours to growth and thrive.”

ITIS Improves Traffic Information Analysis with Dataupia

ITIS, a leading supplier of traffic and travel information for real-world applications, deployed the Dataupia Satori Server as its underlying data management solution.

Dataupia's data warehouse appliance allows ITIS to cost-effectively manage and access four years worth of data, representing 25 billion traffic flow records. With Dataupia, ITIS can leverage greater volumes of data and perform analyses on its current Microsoft SQL Server database 95 percent faster than previously possible.

“ITIS service offerings are built on proper data management and analysis. As such, we put a lot of time and research into choosing the most effective and efficient solution to improve our current data infrastructure,” said Thomas Shelton, director of operations, ITIS. “We evaluated multiple options and considered everything from increasing traditional storage capacity to migrating to a new database. In the end, Dataupia was the clear choice because its easy integration into our current Microsoft SQL Server environment prevented a costly ‘rip and replace’ of our vested infrastructure. Dataupia has gone above and beyond our expectations. We are already realizing measurable ROI from the Dataupia Satori Server and are confident that we are now utilizing our data to its fullest potential.”

National Center for Genome Resources Chooses Kognitio

Page 1 of 3.