Saving Millions with Open Source Business Intelligence

Syntel is a leading global provider of custom IT and knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) solutions that helps Global 2000 clients operate their businesses more efficiently through innovative use of technology, improved quality and reduced cost. Recently, we brought one of the world’s largest diversified financial services companies a business intelligence solution from open source BI provider Jaspersoft.

For years, the most proven and promoted selling point for open source software has been the ability to save money – plain and simple. Although costs are important, open source brings many other benefits to the table that large, legacy platforms may not be able provide. One of these key benefits is the flexibility open source delivers – it evolves with customer requirements. 

In the business intelligence landscape, enterprise software providers have built out their BI capabilities through acquisition, assembling legacy software from a different age of technology. Though powerful, the architecture of these legacy systems can force customers to free up massive server space, incur expensive training and upgrade costs, and undergo lengthy transitions when a migration becomes necessary.

Jaspersoft’s open source software can provide enterprise-class BI that is also lightweight, modular, agile, self-serviceable and easily deployable on many platforms – whether you’re operating in-house, on a SaaS model, in a virtualized environment or even in the cloud.

It is for these reasons (and the given cost savings) that Syntel and Jaspersoft were able to solve a key business intelligence challenge for one of the Fortune 100’s top financial services firms.

Business Challenge

The client had deployed a reporting solution responsible for generating reports on more than one million financial transactions submitted each month by its B2B partners. These reports were used not only to support the client’s financial audits and end-of-day processing, but also to supply the data necessary for their risk management analytics.

The client found itself in a common situation – its product vendor was phasing out support for the version it had installed.

In order to keep this critical system running smoothly, the firm would be forced to upgrade to a newer version – which meant higher licensing fees, a time-consuming and costly upgrade project and potential infrastructure bottlenecks during the upgrade process. Even worse, the new version did not support the client’s storage architecture.

What the firm needed was feature-rich reporting that offered easy deployment and maintenance, robust self-service capabilities and enhanced end-user productivity, ideally while saving money on licensing fees as well as support and maintenance costs.