Technology
Eliminate costly manual processes in the face of a growing volume and variety of data.
Automated data integration platform built on Pentaho technologies and connected to public cloud.
To improve its operations and revenue, demandi uses Pentaho Data Integration.
The customer insights managers at demandi help 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.
In 2015, demandi was founded as a subsidiary of market research company Interrogare. Interrogare 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. Creating a centralized view of different data sources could take several weeks. “Data was collated and analyzed using specialist statistical software; it then had to be transferred to PowerPoint before it could be shared with customers,” explains Jens Adam, CEO of demandi. “There were a lot of inefficient and expensive manual steps.”
Interrogare decided to found demandi as a company that build the entire technical foundation in order to offer a fully automated market research solution to its customers. As well as creating more streamlined processes, demandi needed to embrace new data sources as part of its customer insights activities.
“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,” says Adam.
To achieve its automation ambitions, demandi looked at Hitachi Vantara’s Pentaho platform. Unaware that there was an enterprise edition, the company implemented the open-source version of Pentaho. With internet articles and e-books as their only sources of knowledge, implementing Pentaho seemed very complicated to demandi staff.
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.
To help accelerate and optimize the deployment and configuration of the new solution, demandi can also tap into Hitachi Vantara’s extensive data management expertise. “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.”
Metadata injection is another important feature for demandi. As well as streamlining the initial implementation, this unique Pentaho capability accelerates the onboarding of new clients and the loading of new data. “We didn’t have a template for ingesting different data sources, so the process had to be redefined every time,” explains Adam. “With Pentaho’s metadata injection, we can handle diverse data sources without implementation at speed and at scale.”
Thanks to Hitachi Vantara’s big data integration and analytics solution, demandi has fully automated its data management process, from data collection and processing to analysis and visualization. “Our next goal is to scale and optimize the platform, for example, by implementing parallel processing and clustering,” explains Adam. “With Pentaho, we can keep enhancing performance so we can manage the very big increase in data volumes we need to process.”
The Hitachi Vantara solution has helped demandi differentiate its services in an industry where many companies are only just starting to think about new technologies. “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.”
Already, demandi has been able to establish new services and revenue streams. 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.
The Pentaho implementation has been such a success that parent company Interrogare and demandi customers are looking at how they can also leverage the technology. “The Pentaho solution offers demandi great opportunities for the future. We are already seeing it boost our reputation and give us a distinct competitive advantage,” concludes Adam. “Potential customers are already requesting the solutions we are providing at demandi, built on Pentaho technology.”
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With Pentaho, we’ve transformed how we manage data and how we take our services to market.
– Jens Adam, CEO, demandi