Centro enhances the success of advertising agencies by helping them develop and execute comprehensive local digital campaign solutions. Using its proprietary technology, Centro streamlines the complex process of buying and selling online advertising among hundreds of national and regional agencies and thousands of local online publishers.
Servicing more than 450 advertisers through their respective agencies, Centro quickly outgrew its Excel-based reporting system and sought a more complete business intelligence solution to drive better insight into operations and help steer strategic decision-making in today's challenging economic environment.
After evaluating offerings from different commercial open source BI vendors, Centro selected Pentaho for its complete end-to-end BI capabilities, functional equivalency with proprietary BI software, and the value-added software and services in Pentaho. Centro began using Pentaho Data Integration to integrate information from its custom media planning system to build a comprehensive data warehouse. The powerful, easy-to-use design environment of Pentaho Data Integration automated the extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) processes to create the data warehouse and currently updates information on a daily basis. With a solid information infrastructure in place, Centro expanded to use the capabilities of the Pentaho platform to add query and reporting functionalities, interactive analysis, and dashboard features.
Centro is using Pentaho Data Integration and Pentaho Business Analytics to deliver over 50 on-demand, user-prompted reports and interactive analysis views across every level of the organization. Every department, from the executive team to sales managers and from finance to marketing and technology, has access to data. Pentaho gives Centro greater visibility into customer, cost, and revenue trends with the ability to conduct deeper analysis on historical data across all facets of their media service offerings. Additionally, Pentaho has improved operational performance. By creating more efficiency in the organization, the BI solution has added greater value to Centro's clients and has reduced internal costs. Pentaho is deployed on Dell servers running CentOS, Apache, the Tomcat application server and the PostgreSQL database.