The ICT Professional: Quentin Gallivan, Pentaho

 

 

Pentaho is an analytics software company with open source roots. We’ve developed a whole range of analytics that allow companies to analyse data through reports and dashboards against the Cloud. The company has been around for seven years and we have over 10,000 companies around the world using our products: forty per cent of our customers are outside of our home US market and a good proportion of those are in the UK.

 

 

We are actively targeting the public sector on a global basis. We recently signed a deal with Islington NHS Primary Care Trust, which uses our analytics for predictive analysis on the cost of care based on patient analytics. We now have HL7 certification for healthcare; that’s a healthcare data format standards that simplifies the interface between different systems. In Europe, meanwhile, we’re seeing some interesting examples of adoption of the Cloud across the public sector [and see here for a PublicTechnology.net look at an implementation at a Belgian public-private ICT organisation, Cipal]. My impression is that the public sector seems to be really getting behind the Cloud to provide better services in a more cost effective way.

 

 

The public sector is being forced to do a lot more with less. Being able to operate efficiently is a real focus. I think one of the most compelling arguments is that we provide rich analytical products at 10% of the cost of traditional analytics vendors. It’s really about looking at more cost effective ways to provide technology. Our products are built on new generation technology, which makes it faster to implement. There is massive economic value in terms of upfront cost and time to implement the solution. And I’ve met public sector ICT leaders at the Business Cloud Summit today and you can see there’s real interest in the Cloud.

 

 

The evolution of business intelligence and analytics is fascinating. Our primary market has been analysing relational data and giving customers an insight into their business. While that’s continuing to grow but there’s a new trend – Big Data. Essentially it’s web data and social media data.

 

So I see a need for organisations of all types to understand their customers’ and users’ behaviour on websites or across social media to give them a complete view of what’s going on across their organisation. It’s analysing what customer have bought from them and what they’re saying about them – marrying transactional data and customer sentiment. That’s definitely an emerging requirement for the public sector, too.

 

 

In the US, the public sector market is very healthy because they like open source and the UK market definitely seems to be opening up and seeing open source as a viable solution. We recognise that all government organisations are going to have to do more with less and because our technology is based on a modern architecture it is 90% cheaper than traditional solutions.