In an industry so focused on the race to adapt and competitive innovation, use cases that highlight the real-life applications for big data are an opportunity to reaffirm tech’s impact on the world at large. This year’s winners of a 2017 Pentaho Excellence Award in the return-on-investment category serves as an example of what ideation and supportive platforms like Pentaho’s big data integration and analytics solutions can achieve together.

“I am really proud of this award, because it is related to public administration savings … [and] healthcare spending,” said Stefano Celati (pictured), certified Pentaho solutions consultant at BNova Consulting, which consulted with LAZIOcrea, the administrative branch of Italy’s central region, to implement Pentaho software. The goal: to better analyze healthcare data and costs with a single view. Since the implementation, LAZIOcrea has reduced unnecessary prescriptions and saved 41 million euros, or approximately $48 million.

Celati spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and James Kobielus (@jameskobielus), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the PentahoWorld event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed BNova’s work from conception to completion on the project, as well as what Celati hopes to achieve with Pentaho in the future. (* Disclosure below.)

Innovation for all

Celati’s work began a couple of years ago when the region Lazio launched a project to monitor, analyze and inspect the spending flow in prescription drugs. BNova partnered with LAZIOcrea to create a business analytics platform based on Pentaho, collecting all the data coming from the prescriptions and storing it in the analytical database Vertica. Celati’s team then used Pentaho Data Integration software extract, transform and load tools to store this data and present it to those in charge of managing drug expenditures.

The project was a huge success, saving the region 34 million Euros in a year. “Simply monitoring the expenditure … what kind of medicine they prescribe and targeting what pharmacies sell to the end user gave these impressive results,” Celati said. This year, BNova is forecasting 41 million Euros more in savings.

The financial benefits to this initiative are only the beginning, according to Celati. “During the last major earthquake we had in 2016 … LAZIOcrea was able to produce a list of the most-needed drugs in that area in just a couple of hours … and set up this list that helped the first-aid units in giving the right assistance on time,” Celati said.

Though the Italian market may not be hyper vigilant in its response to innovation, Celati is pushing for local growth and expansion of big data and the “internet of things.”

“We are starting to talk about smart cities for … sustainable energy and other stuff in which the IoT plays a key role,” he said. To encourage these efforts, BNova has started an annual Big Data Tech event to spread knowledge about big data systems, products and architecture, helping companies expand their understandings of what they can do with these platforms.

As an award-winning tech innovator, Celati considers it his duty to share best practices with other businesses. “Companies like BNova … that operate in this field of business analytics need to put to general knowledge what other innovative companies are doing. We will have to support other companies with this kind of stuff,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of PentahoWorld. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for PentahoWorld. Neither Hitachi Vantara Corp., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE