Complication – This Large Retailer was storing growing volumes of structured data in a traditional data warehouse environment that was very costly from both a license and maintenance perspective. The data was primarily from their online/web environment and included data from tools like Adobe Marketing Cloud (formerly Omniture). The original plan was to migrate the data into a managed Hadoop instance, but the client discovered that there would still be significant ongoing maintenance costs with this solution. As an alternative, the client wanted to explore leveraging a Cloud environment for their current and future data needs, and asked Aspirent for assistance as they had limited experience with these solutions.
Approach – Aspirent engaged with the customer to first understand their requirements and then:
- Assisted with selecting Google Cloud as the pilot solution
- Worked with Adobe and built a process to deliver hourly files from Omniture directly to the Google Cloud
- Utilized the Google Data Flow product to build out a number of views of the data
- Enriched the data with other sources
- Optimized storage for fast reporting
Tableau is being used by the business to explore the data that is available and to better understand customer interaction and buying behavior on the website.
Results
Aspirent has the experience the client needed with Google and other Cloud solutions. The journey to move all data to the Cloud may take multiple years, however the client is pleased with the results gained thus far. The expectation is that the Cloud environment will help the client save multi-millions of dollars in license cost and internal labor cost on a yearly basis.
