Interrogare, a 20 year old market research company in Germany, conducts more than two million interviews each year across a range of industry sectors and focus areas, including product pricing, employee engagement, brand awareness and customer loyalty. Legacy tools and labor intensive manual processes were making it increasingly difficult to not only gather, store and analyze survey data but also to share findings with clients. According to their executives there were a lot of inefficient and expensive manual stepsCreating a centralized view of different data sources could take several weeks.
In 2015Interrogare decided to found demanti as a company to build the technical foundation for a fully automated market research solution to streamline the process and incorporate new data sources as part of its customer insights activities. The customer insights managers at demandihelp organizations to maximize the value of business information by creating 360-degree customer views. These views combine insights from enterprise resource management (ERP) platforms, customer relationship management (CRM) solutions and satisfaction surveys.
Jens Adams, the CEO of demandi described the challenges: “We needed to be able to ingest data from web analytics and cloud-based platforms, such as Salesforce. We also wanted to improve our visualization capabilities, so we could present research findings in different formats according to client preferences,”
demandi began by implementing the open-source version of Pentaho but found it difficult as their only source of knowledge was from internet articles and e-books. But everything changed when they met the Hitachi Vantara team at a conference. Shortly afterwards, in 2017, demandi deployed the enterprise version of Pentaho Data Integration (PDI). “Hitachi Vantara was so enthusiastic about how Pentaho could help transform our business. We felt that the team understood our challenges and we knew it was the right solution for us. With Hitachi Vantara, we can tap into powerful data extraction, transformation and loading capabilities,” says Adam.
Hitachi Vantara’s extensive data management expertise helped to accelerate and optimize the deployment and configuration of the new solution. “The best practices shared by the Hitachi Vantara team were invaluable. They helped us establish a stable operational environment and maximize the ‘drag and drop’ data management features of Pentaho.” Hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), demandi’s infrastructure made good use of Pentaho’s rich library of prebuilt connectors during implementation. “The Amazon Redshift and S3 connectors gave us a head start on integrating the new solution with our cloud environment,” says Adam. “Pentaho is a very open system, which is extremely important for us.”
This was a classic example of a DataOps implementation effort. DataOps, at a high level, is the process of delivering the right data to the right place at the right time. There are many tools available to deliver DataOps processes. In fact, there are often too many options, which can easily add to confusion and unnecessary delays and restarts. The DataOps advantage that Hitachi Vantara delivered was the data management expertise that our personnel were able to deliver and the tried and tested library of prebuilt connectors in the enterprise version of Pentaho.
Another DataOps advantage that was cited by Mr. Adams was Pentaho’s unique Metadata injection capability. Metadata injection streamlines the initial implementation and accelerates the onboarding of new clients and the loading of new data. For example, you might have a simple transformation to load transaction data values from a supplier, filter specific values, and output them to a file. If you have more than one supplier, you would need to run this simple transformation for each supplier. Yet, with metadata injection, you can expand this simple repetitive transformation by inserting metadata from another transformation that contains the ETL Metadata Injection step. This step coordinates the data values from the various inputs through the metadata you define. This process reduces the need for you to adjust and run the repetitive transformation for each specific input.
The Hitachi Vantara DataOps advantage has helped demandi differentiate its services in an industry where many companies are only just starting to think about new technologies. For example, it can now use intelligence captured in Pentaho to help clients track trends and real-time key performance indicators (KPIs). With this capability, the company can gain insights into key business processes and functions, such as product returns, purchase volumes and customer satisfaction.
“We’ve transformed how we manage data and how we take our services to market,” says Adam. “With smarter data integration and ingestion, demandi and Interrogare can position themselves as a disruptor in the market research industry.”
Please click on this demandi link to see their DataOps story.