Bell Helicopter Selects Zend and Infobright to Improve Enterprise Reporting Application for Better Business Intelligence

CUPERTINO, Calif., and TORONTO, June 8, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Zend Technologies and its partner Infobright today announced that Bell Helicopter, the world's leading provider of vertical lift aircraft, chose Zend® Server and the Infobright® Enterprise Edition (IEE) analytic database to improve its large-scale enterprise reporting application for better business intelligence. The success of this effort also helped Bell Helicopter regain a critical U.S. government certification and resume work on contracts valued in the tens of millions of dollars.

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Known as Premier, the Bell Helicopter application dynamically captures and reports on real-time and historical data from more than 40 different data sources originating from financial, HR, manufacturing, ERP and other systems across the organization. The 1500-page application was developed in PHP running MySQL on Windows, and then integrated with other Bell Helicopter enterprise applications. Much of the reporting involves large data stores, ad-hoc queries, large summary tables and trending reports requiring robust database analytics.

Using IEE in conjunction with Zend Server and Zend Server Cluster Manager, Bell Helicopter was able to introduce application monitoring and root-cause diagnostics, speed analytic queries on executive dashboards by up to 500 percent, achieve 10:1 compression for improved resource utilization, and scale up to deliver vital business intelligence to thousands of end users.  

Within its first four months since deployment, the Premier application achieved significant performance gains:

• 91% improvement for Earned Value Dashboard display times
• 96% improvement in cost reports query return times
• 98% improvement for SAP data report results
• Proactive application monitoring and PHP code tracing to enable early problem detection, and root-cause analysis for rapid problem resolution
• Built-in code optimization and acceleration for high performance and low resource utilization
• Session clustering to achieve a fast, scalable and integrated failover solution

Quotes

Scott Hathaway, manager of EVM reporting and analysis, Bell Helicopter

"The Premier application is strategic to Bell Helicopter's business. Zend and Infobright are helping us ensure that users get fast access to the business intelligence they need—while automating and streamlining application development and data administration. With the combined solution we are delivering essential performance and storage upgrades while remaining well within budget."

Ran Gishri, vice president of marketing, Zend Technologies

"We applaud Bell Helicopter for its exceptional achievement with the timely and cost-effective development of Premier. They tapped the power of Zend Server to help development teams be more productive and ensure performance and scalability of a large-scale business-critical application."  

Susan Davis, vice president of marketing & product management, Infobright

"We're pleased that Infobright has been able to help Bell Helicopter slash the costs, time and administration involved in extracting valuable insight from its corporate data. Fast access to vital business intelligence helps support more productive and profitable decision-making organization-wide."

Read the Case Study:  Bell Helicopter Takes Business Intelligence to New Heights with Zend and Infobright

View the Webinar:  Making Data More Accessible at Bell Helicopter with Infobright and Zend    

About Bell Helicopter

Bell Helicopter, a wholly owned subsidiary of Textron Inc., is an industry-leading producer of commercial and military, manned and unmanned vertical lift aircraft and the pioneer of the revolutionary tilt rotor aircraft. Globally recognized for world-class customer service, innovation and superior quality, Bell's global workforce serves customers flying Bell aircraft in more than 120 countries. For more information, visit http://www.bellhelicopter.textron.com

About Infobright

Infobright's high-performance database is the preferred choice for applications and data marts that analyze large volumes of "machine-generated data" such as Web data, network logs, telecom records, stock tick data and sensor data. Easy to implement and with unmatched data compression, operational simplicity and low cost, Infobright is being used by enterprises, SaaS and software companies in online businesses, telecommunications, financial services and other industries to provide rapid access to critical business data. For more information, please visit www.infobright.com or join the open source community at www.infobright.org.

About Zend

Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP Company, is the leading provider of software and services for developing, deploying and managing business-critical PHP applications for on-premise and cloud computing environments. PHP runs more than one-third of the world's Web sites and has become the most popular language for building dynamic Web applications. Deployed at more than 40,000 companies worldwide, the Zend family of products delivers a comprehensive solution supporting the entire application lifecycle. Zend is headquartered in California with offices in France, Germany, Ireland, Israel and Italy. Visit www.zend.com, or follow Zend at www.twitter.com/zend.

All names referred to are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE Zend Technologies