Pentaho Community Meeting will take place at the end of this week and I’m pleased to introduce the last presentation. It will deal with the Pentaho ecosystem and introduce an application for data analytics based on Mondrian. The tool’s name is eazyBI and it comes from Latvia. I have talked to Raimonds Simanovskis, the developer of eazyBI.
Raimonds, who are you?
I am the founder and core developer of the business intelligence web application eazyBI. Previously, I had a long “enterprise software development” history, but in the recent years I have been more interested in open source technologies. Currently, I mostly use (and love) Ruby and JavaScript programming languages. I am also open data activist and have been one of the initial open data promoters in Latvia. I am a frequent speaker at conferences and other events and like to share my experience about software development and bootstrapping a business. I am still keeping the balance of being a half geek and half entrepreneur.
What is your connection to Pentaho?
Six years ago, I started my company EazyOne to build the business intelligence application eazyBI. Previously, I have been using several BI tools from big vendors but I wanted to build something simpler and easier to implement and use. I was looking at several open source business intelligence technologies that I could use as components in my application and I found the Pentaho Mondrian project.
Mondrian had quite an impressive functionality as well as it was easy to embed it in other applications. As I was building eazyBI in Ruby on Rails (using JRuby implementation on JVM) I created a JRuby library mondrian-olap which embeds the Mondrian engine and provides Ruby API for describing schemas and making queries.
What will your talk be about?
I will talk about our eazyBI application and how we built it using Pentaho Mondrian engine, what are the main components, standard integrations for data import, typical use cases when eazyBI is used. In particular, I will speak about eazyBI add-on for Atlassian Jira.
Today, eazyBI is one of the top Jira add-ons on the Atlassian Marketplace and more than thousand Jira customers are using it to analyze data and build reports, charts and dashboards from Jira, Jira add-ons, and other data sources. I will also share how we managed to build a fast growing and successful business on the Atlassian Marketplace.
Which organizations are using eazyBI and why?
Currently, the majority of eazyBI customers are Atlassian Jira users. Jira is a very powerful and flexible application where you can define a lot of custom fields, create custom workflows and use many additional add-ons. But the standard Jira reporting capabilities are quite limited. This is where eazyBI can help – with it you can import both standard and custom Jira issue fields, build custom reports with an easy drag-and-drop interface, create many different chart types and dashboards.
eazyBI also can pull data from other Jira applications like Jira Software and Jira Service Desk, from many additional add-ons for test management, time tracking, asset management. The same eazyBI application is available both as an installable Jira Server add-ons as well as a hosted eazyBI add-on for Jira Cloud. We also focus on providing high-quality support – we learn about the customer needs and provide guidance and samples how to build reports for customer specific needs.
Thanks to the rapid growth of our customer base we were recently nominated as one of the fastest growing technology companies in Deloitte Technology Fast 50 in Central Europe.
What do you expect from Pentaho Community Meeting?
This will be my third PCM, previously I have been twice in PCMs in Antwerp. As we are are using just a small part of Pentaho’s solutions it is interesting to learn from other use cases how Pentaho is used for business intelligence projects. It gives us new ideas how to develop our application. I also like to meet Pentaho community members as they all are friendly and ready to share their experience. I have good memories from the previous meetings and I hope that this one will be even better.
