Case Study: Empire Airlines achieves real-time, actionable BI with Information Builders' WebFOCUS Analytics Appliance

Empire Airlines Takes Off With Turnkey BI Appliance

Empire Airlines, a Hayden, Idaho–based passenger and cargo carrier operating more than 120 scheduled cargo flights daily across 18 states and Canada, needed a powerful but affordable BI and analytics solution suited to a small-to-midsize service business. The airline relied heavily on Excel for reporting and wanted an on‑premises, turnkey platform that could support BI plus other virtual environments (e‑mail, domain controller, terminal server) without the cost and complexity of enterprise offerings.

They deployed the Scale Analytics Appliance — Scale Computing’s HC3 virtualization platform bundled with Information Builders’ WebFOCUS Business User Edition — to supplement Excel with interactive reports, dashboards and proactive alerts. The appliance was quick to install, required minimal IT involvement, and delivered fresh, real‑time data to executives, managers and operations staff; it sped up MRO reporting, enabled HR recruiting dashboards, and set the foundation for predictive analytics and broader cloud data analysis.

Empire Airlines

Melanie Ellingson

Director of IT