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Challenge
Solution
Outcome
Kingland provides an analytics solution for their financial services, auditing and insurance customers.
The Challenge : Kingland’s Customers Requiring Stronger Analytics Tools
Kingland Systems is a data management platform and services provider for financial services, auditing and insurance companies. They were founded in 1992 and are privately held. Their customers include many companies in the Fortune 500.
The financial industry is in a perpetual state of change. This presents many financial services companies with a challenge when it comes to how they store, analyze and manage the quality of their data, particularly as firms work to stay compliant with regulatory requirements. Most customers have multiple systems with different data formats that require extensive manual loading and parsing of data by Kingland whenever customers wanted to conduct analysis.
In today’s world of big data, this can be a truly daunting task when you consider the millions of new transactions these organizations generate each business day and the decades’ worth of previous transaction records they are required to store and maintain over time. With all of this data, how do financial services firms quickly find the reference data in transactions involving different legal entities, especially in situations involving acquisitions or mergers? This is a common necessity in order to be compliant with financial regulations. If you’re a financial services company in the Fortune 500, chances are you look to Kingland to answer that question.
Kingland assembles the software, data management and cloud-hosting solutions needed to create a turnkey data management platform for their customers in the insurance, audit and financial services markets. As Kingland looked to add an enterprise data management solution to its own platform, Pentaho’s solutions struck a chord with Kingland’s development team, which ultimately led them to integrating Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) and Pentaho’s business analytics into the Kingland platform. What was it about Pentaho’s data management solutions that won over Kingland? It was fast ramp up time, scalability and ease of use.
The Solution: Pentaho Data Integration, Embeddable Pentaho Business Analytics
Pentaho’s solution helps financial services organizations better understand their relationships with customers, subsidiaries and legal entities – with a major focus on risk mitigation. Pentaho empowers Kingland to analyze any data quality issues, while also allowing the end user’s data analysts to easily create their own reports and dashboards to present and analyze the cleansed, blended data. Pentaho’s data management and visualization capabilities augment the Kingland platform for financial services. Kingland relies on Pentaho’s big data integration and analytics solution for their analytics engine for their blue-chip financial services customers.
“Out of a desire to provide an all-in-one data management solution, other vendors’ data platforms consist of different solutions obtained through acquisition, bolted together and marketed as a platform. This usually creates a large, overly complex environment that doesn’t easily integrate into our existing platform,” said Matt Good, Managing Director of Software Architecture, Kingland. “We liked that Pentaho was a unified data integration and analytics solution with open source roots. This resulted in a quick and painless integration into our open-source based platform that includes PostgreSQL, Spring and Apache products like Tomcat and Hadoop. Leveraging Kingland DevOps’ automated install capabilities, we can now install our implementation of Pentaho on a new client server in less than 30 minutes.”
To help the Kingland team quickly ramp up their implementation, they turned to the Pentaho services team to help start the team o on the right path with training and consulting.
“The product training and support we received from Pentaho was top notch, and the tools they provided helped us deliver data solutions to customers quickly,” said Trond Gjendem, Managing Director of Software Architecture at Kingland. “Combine the excellent training with a strong product design based on open source software that’s widely used in the industry, and we were able to cut our implementation time to half of what was required for other solutions.”
The Outcome: Kingland Simplifies Their Platform By Embedding Pentaho
Kingland was able to cut their data analytics and integration implementation time in half. By leveraging Pentaho’s metadata injection feature to intelligently generate transformations on the fly, Kingland accelerates the onboarding of different data sources into their platform. Their team spends less time wrestling with technical challenges and more time analyzing customer data.
Pentaho’s open source roots made integration with Kingland’s platform seamless. Pentaho’s solution’s small software footprint made rolling out Pentaho quick and easy. World-class customer service and support had Kingland trained and running its Pentaho integration in little time. Additionally, the flexible data integration and UI framework allowed the execution and delivery of data quality reports has been streamlined. Kingland can now easily inject metadata from different data sources into their platform.
The ease of use of Pentaho’s solutions was also evident when the time came for Kingland to start equipping customers to run self-service analytics. Most customers have multiple systems with different data formats that would have required extensive manual loading and parsing of data by Kingland whenever customers wanted to conduct analysis. The simplicity of Pentaho’s solutions eliminated this requirement. In particular, Pentaho Data Integration enabled Kingland to automatically load and process customer data across many formats, removing the bottleneck in customer data onboarding. Further, Pentaho empowers Kingland to analyze any data quality issues, while also allowing the end user’s data analysts to easily create their own reports and dashboards to present and analyze the cleansed, blended data.
Kingland’s customers have been thrilled to see the new capabilities around data management and visualization that the Pentaho integration has provided. Good summed up his experience working with Pentaho by saying, “Our customers like working with us thanks to the uncommon speed, precision, creativity and reliability we bring to solving their problems. It was a great experience working with another vendor that also embodies the same values.”