According to a recent study by KX, US businesses could see a total revenue uplift of $2.6 trillion through investment in real-time data analytics. From telecommunication to retail, businesses are harnessing the power of data analytics to optimize operations and drive growth.
Striim is a data integration platform that connects data from different applications and services to deliver real-time data analytics. These three companies successfully harnessed data analytics through Striim and serve as excellent examples of the practical applications of this valuable tool across industries and use cases.
1. Ciena: Enabling Fast Real-time Insights to Telecommunication Network Changes
Ciena is an American telecommunications networking equipment and software services supplier. It provides networking solutions to support the world’s largest telecommunications service providers, submarine network operators, data and cloud operators, and large enterprises.
Use cases
Ciena’s data team wanted to build a modern, self-serve data and analytics ecosystem that:
- Improves the customer experience by enabling real-time insights and intelligent automation to network changes as they occur.
- Facilitates data access across the enterprise by removing silos and empowering every team to make data-driven decisions quickly.
To meet its goals, Ciena chose Snowflake as its data warehousing platform for operational reporting and analytics and Striim as its data integration and streaming solution to replicate changes from its Oracle database to Snowflake. The company used Striim to collect, filter, aggregate, and update (in real time) 40-90 million business events to Snowflake daily across systems that manage manufacturing, sales, and dozens of other crucial business functions to enable advanced real-time analytics.
With its real-time analytics platform, Ciena has offered customers up-to-date insights as changes occurred in its network, thus improving the customer experience. Additionally, operators can begin experimenting with machine learning by using real-time analytics to identify network events that could impact performance.
Finally, with its self-serve analytics platform, everyone in the organization can now access the data they need to make faster data-driven decisions. With real-time analytics, Ciena’s customers no longer have to wait to see their updated data because it is displayed instantly after any changes are made in the source platforms.
“Because of Striim, we have so much customer and operational data at our fingertips. We can build all kinds of solutions without worrying about how we’ll provide them with timely data,” Rajesh Raju, director of data engineering at Ciena, explains.
2. Macy’s: Improving Digital and Mobile Shopping Experiences
Macy’s, Inc. is one of America’s largest retailers, delivering quality fashion to customers in more than 100 international destinations through the leading e-commerce site macys.com. Macy’s, Inc. sells a wide range of products, including men’s, women’s, and children’s clothes and accessories, cosmetics, home furnishings, and more.
Use cases
Macy’s real-time analytics use cases were to:
- Achieve real-time visibility into customer and inventory orders to maximize operational cost, especially during the peak holiday events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday
- Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to personalize customer shopping experiences.
- Quickly turn data into actionable insights that help Macy’s deliver quality digital customer experiences and improve operational efficiencies.
Macy’s migrated its on-premise inventory and order data to Google Cloud storage to reach its objectives. The company decided to move to the cloud based on the benefits of cost efficiency, flexibility, and improved data management. To facilitate the data integration process, it used Striim, which allowed it to:
- Import historical and real-time on-premise data from its Oracle and DB2 mainframe databases.
- Process the data in flight, including detecting and transforming mismatched timestamp fields.
- Continuously deliver data to its Big Query data warehouse for scalable analysis of petabytes of information.
Real-time data analytics has been a critical factor in Macy’s ability to understand customer behaviors and improve the shopping experience for its customers. Data analytics has enabled the company to increase customer purchases and loyalty and optimize its operations to minimize costs. As a result, Macy’s has been able to offer its customers a seamless and personalized shopping experience.
3. MineralTree: Facilitating Real-time Customer Invoice Reporting
MineralTree, formerly Inspyrus, is a fintech SaaS company specializing in automating the accounts payable (AP) process of invoice capture, invoice approval, payment authorization, and payment completion. To do this, the company connects with hundreds of different ERP and accounting systems companies and streamlines the entire AP process into a unified system.
Use cases
MineralTree wanted to build a real-time data analytics system to:
- Provide customers with a real-time view of all their invoicing reports as they occur.
- Help customers visualize their data using a business intelligence tool.
MineralTree used Striim to seamlessly integrate customer data from various ERP and accounting systems into its Snowflake cloud data warehouse. Striim’s data integration connector enabled the company to generate real-time operational data from Snowflake and use it to power the business intelligence reports it provides to customers through Looker.
MineralTree updated data stack, consisting of Striim, Snowflake, dbt, and Looker, has enhanced the invoicing operations of its customers through rich, value-added reports.
According to Prashant Soral, CTO, the real-time data integration provided by Striim from operational systems to Snowflake has been particularly beneficial in generating detailed, live reports for its customers.
Transform How Your Company Operates Using Real-time Analytics With Striim
Real-time analytics transforms how your business operates by providing accurate, up-to-date information that can help you make better decisions and optimize your operations.
Striim offers an enterprise-grade platform that allows you to easily build continuous, streaming data pipelines to support real-time cloud integration, log correlation, edge processing, and analytics. Request a demo today.
