Kiva Adopts Pentaho BI Software

Michael Garrity — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 17:30:00 GMT

Non-profit microfinance platform Kiva.org has officially adopted Pentaho BI Enterprise Edition to automate its reporting and analytical capabilites.

Kiva's goal as an organization is to leverage the Internet and global network of microfinance institutions to help alleviate poverty. Since being founded in 2005, Kiva has made possible over $225 million in microlans between individual lenders and entrepreneurs around the world. This growth eventually led to a great increase in demand for its service, which meant that it needed a flexible, scalabe and cost-effective data warehouse and reporting system that could efficiently unify a variety of data sources and satisfy a wide-array of customers using that data.

Now, with the help of Pentaho, Kiva has switched from a "spread-mart" environment, where each department had different views of disparate data sources, to one that is able to validate and publicize numbers across the company.

Pentaho is one of the world's leading providers of business intelligence (BI) software.

Kiva now has the ability to empower users and has converted their employees into a small army of true knowledge workers. This is a tremendous improvement for a group running an online microfinance organization that requires rapid decision-making. Pentaho aided in this transition by providing the Kiva team with an Agile BI and real-time data flow.

In a press release this morning, Kiva said that they have seen an almost immediate return on investment (ROI) in their adoption of Pentaho's software. In replacing Excel, Kiva claim to already be seeing recompense with people outside of their IT department analyzing their own data and creating their own reports, allowing the engineering team to focus on the "heavy lifting" required by their website and spend far less (if any) time building custom reports.

Does this glowing recommendation from Kiva pique your interest in adopting Pentaho's BI software for your own company?

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Kiva Adopts Pentaho BI Software