Case Study

Uncovering Innovation Opportunities at a Leading Data Storage Company

The Challenge

The global high-tech leader offers data storage solutions that are used by companies and individuals whether in the office, home, car, pocket, or the cloud. It is mission-critical for the data storage company to innovate its products and services and consistently deliver value to its customers.

Obtaining insights on how customers use its products and services is ingrained into the company’s end-to-end development and manufacturing processes. The Product Engineering team, for example, uses insights on product usage to optimize existing products and build new products to meet customer needs. Meanwhile, the Quality and Control team helps the company’s mission by testing and monitoring hard drives that are in development and production, as well as returned products. These teams collect and use the same product manufacturing and product usage data to understand how the products are used, why customers returned products, and uncover any quality issues or trends on specific products. The data, however, was collected from disparate servers that led to siloed data, making it extremely difficult to uncover product trends and the root cause of product returns.

“We built a homegrown tool to perform ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) to fuel product analytics,” said the Manager of Cloud Data Warehousing from the data storage company’s Big Data team. “We’d load data from servers in multiple data centers around the world – including Thailand, the Bay Area, Las Vegas, among other locations – into a single data store.” However, the tool proved to be unscalable as IT poured resources in to manually build and maintain integrations that required constant maintenance and code updates. As the company grew organically and through its acquisitions over the years, the technology infrastructure became even more complex, requiring more database integrations.

The Solution

The Cloud Data Warehouse Manager and his Big Data team re-evaluated how they could help the teams gain access to siloed product data. They built a data strategy that consisted of centralizing product data in their enterprise cloud data warehouse, Amazon Redshift.

They sought a low-code, out-of-the-box integration solution that could serve as a unified integration layer and replace its home-grown integration tool. Unlike other integration tools, SnapLogic addressed integrations beyond traditional ETL and highly complemented their AWS technology landscape. “We selected SnapLogic over other vendors for its ease-of-use, flexibility, low-code approach, and hybrid integration capabilities,” said the Cloud Data Warehouse Manager.

Once the team implemented SnapLogic and Amazon Redshift, they quickly connected on-premises and cloud systems, such as Amazon RDS, SAP, Oracle databases, manufacturing execution systems (MES), and other on-premises data servers from around the world.

“In addition to accessing product usage data, we also empower the quality team to access product inventory and warranty data in ERP systems,” said the Cloud Data Warehouse Manager. “This data is critical in order to gain a holistic view of our products in the market to assess areas for innovation.” The quality team not only explores why products are returned but also handles shipping and handling of returns. The team can better prioritize uncovering the root causes of returns by automating the returns process.

Business Outcomes

After implementing SnapLogic as the enterprise integration platform for the data storage company, the Big Data team is able to deliver data integrations rapidly for teams across the business.

The Cloud Data Warehouse Manager and his team can now deliver data integrations to many business groups, helping speed up product innovations and ensure high-quality products are put into the hands of customers. “SnapLogic is truly a self-service integration platform,” said the Cloud Data Warehouse Manager. “It is easy to learn and use, allowing our teams to build integrations on SnapLogic with little-to-no ramp-up. Other IT teams in the organization are starting to adopt SnapLogic to build integrations to support their business users as well.”