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Nexway

Nexway Brings Rapid Sales Performance Insight to Clients With Pentaho Platform

Nexway

INDUSTRY

Financial Services, E-Commerce

SOLUTIONS

SOFTWARE

SERVICES

Premium Support from Hitachi Vantara

Challenge

Challenge:

Gain rapid intelligence on sales performance and the cost of payments.

Solution

Solution:

Harness Pentaho Platform to provide dashboards and reports to internal and external users.

Outcomes

  • Increase insight into the total cost of different payment methods.
  • Automate delivery of internal reports and external client reports.
  • Gain flexibility to meet new analytics requirements from clients.
  • Optimize marketing through detailed analysis of sales by product, territory, and more.

Challenge: Seek Out Fresh Insights

With more than 700 clients and activities spanning more than 140 countries, Nexway is a leading global vendor of e-commerce solutions. Nexway specializes in enabling software publishers and software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers to build and manage online stores where they can sell subscriptions and deliver software to consumers. By seamlessly handling all the complexities of online sales, invoicing, taxation, subscription management, and multicurrency global payments, Nexway empowers its clients to focus on developing and marketing their software products and services.

Reporting to clients on sales performance has always been an important element of Nexway's services, requiring the company to consolidate and analyze data from several underlying systems. More recently, as Nexway has grown from a Europe-centric business to a truly global player, the variety of payment methods and providers it supports has also grown significantly. This in turn has increased the importance of analyzing payment routes and costs.

"Like practically all enterprises today, we're looking to optimize costs,” explains Frédéric Ribau, Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO) at Nexway. Our clients' end customers always pay the same amount, regardless of the means of payment they choose. However, their choice impacts our costs and, by extension, the fees we negotiate with clients. By analyzing the payment methods and taking transaction failure rates into account, we can see which providers are the most efficient, and promote them to our clients."

As its appetite for analytics has grown, Nexway has continued to rely on Data Integration and Analytics to deliver rapid insight to decision-makers within its own organization and its clients.

Using Pentaho Platform, we have the flexibility to meet our clients’ changing needs around analytics, providing rapid insight that helps them optimize their marketing for increased sales and profitability.

– Frédéric Ribau, CPTO, Nexway

Solution: Growing Solution Matches Increasing Ambitions

Nexway had originally deployed Pentaho Community Edition to replace an in-house-developed analytics tool that had become costly and time-consuming to use. The open-source Pentaho solution provided the scalability and centralization that Nexway wanted, together with user-friendly tools for creating reports and dashboards. As the solution grew in importance and value, Nexway decided to invest in the Enterprise Edition of Data Integration and Analytics, powered by Pentaho technology in the Pentaho Platform portfolio.

"We have automated the generation of a large number of reports with Pentaho Platform, so it has become an important element in our business,” says Nexway Business Intelligence Engineer Stéphane Pierre. “We keep our eye on the market, and we haven’t seen any other solution that combines the deep analysis of data with easy automated reporting like Pentaho Platform does."

He adds, "The interactive reporting is another important feature. It helps our Customer Service Managers respond rapidly to their clients’ changing reporting requirements, without needing any support from technical personnel.”

Having started with an on-premises deployment of Pentaho technologies, Nexway migrated to Google Cloud Platform as part of a broader shift to the cloud. The company maintains around 10 years of processed sales data in its data warehouse, representing between 500GB and 1TB of data in daily use for analytics by around 60 users. The data is sourced from four main systems: payments, subscriptions, and two different e-commerce systems.

"In addition to dashboards, which are integrated into each client's back-office tools, we automatically generate tailored reports and send them to clients by email," says Ribau. "There's huge demand both internally and from clients for business intelligence on sales, which we can visualize and break down by region, country, product, date, and so on."

In addition to reporting on sales performance, Pentaho Platform now provides Nexway with deeper insight into the customer journey, from marketing email open rates and responses to shopping-cart abandonment rates.

Outcome: Easy Access to Powerful Insights

Pentaho Platform gives Nexway powerful analytics and reporting capabilities, with the ability to pull data from multiple sources for a clear view of performance. And by providing both dashboards and detailed reports, Nexway helps its clients autonomously visualize their business performance almost in real time. Larger clients with their own business intelligence (BI) infrastructure can choose to receive raw data; otherwise, Pentaho Platform provides intuitive views with easy filtering for nontechnical users.

"Internally at Nexway, the primary use case for analytics is to determine the most efficient forms of payment," says Pierre. "There's a percentage fee for successful payments, but of course there's also an administrative cost for any payments that get refused. Based on our analysis of these factors, we can see which forms of payment are most cost-effective in each location and recommend them to customers. Equally, we can remove a payment option if it becomes too expensive or negotiate a surcharge if a client wants to maintain that option."

Nexway's clients use the reporting from Pentaho Platform to understand their sales performance, day by day, and across multiple dimensions: country, type of buyer, payment, product, language, promotion, and so on. They can then use this information to optimize their marketing campaigns.

Meanwhile, Nexway’s internal users can use the platform to create sophisticated multidimensional reports via a user-friendly drag-and-drop user interface.

"With Pentaho Platform, our users rarely if ever need support from technical people: It's a highly intuitive solution," says Pierre. "And for our part, we very rarely need to call on support from Hitachi Vantara. The solution is very stable and works extremely well. Another point in the solution's favor is that the pricing remains controlled as our usage grows."

He adds, "Pentaho Platform gives us four distinct solutions — dashboarding, analytics, interactive reports, and predefined reports — in a single platform that makes it easy to configure new external data sources for analysis."

Ribau concludes, “Using Pentaho Platform, we have the flexibility to meet our clients’ changing needs around analytics, providing rapid insight that helps them optimize their marketing for increased sales and profitability.”

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