INDUSTRY WATCH were particularly impressed with its ability to scale and to integrate with our front-end tools .”
Deployment began with an initial proof-of-concept . This involved extracting data from a number of Postgres databases and providing answers to relatively simple user queries . Once it was clear that the approach worked , additional data was added and user numbers quickly grew .
“ Snowflake now underpins our entire business intelligence efforts ,” said Hadley “ It is used by everyone from our product team to finance and senior management who use it to assist in strategic planning .
“ It allows queries to be quickly answered and provides a clear picture of what is going on within the payments infrastructures of our customers .”
Improved customer support
WE WERE PARTICULARLY IMPRESSED WITH ITS ABILITY TO SCALE AND TO INTEGRATE WITH OUR FRONT-END TOOLS .
“ I ’ m confident we now have in place a data platform that will be able to grow and support us for many years to come ,” said Hadley . “ It will also enable us to gain insights and use BI tools in ways that previously would not have been possible .”
We asked Mike Gouline , Data Architect , mx51 , further questions to find out more .
As well as providing in-house support for analytics and business intelligence activity , Snowflake is also used by the mx51 support team to resolve any merchant issues that might arise . For example , if a retailer is experiencing issues with a terminal , data from the machine can be quickly accessed and analyzed to determine the best resolution .
“ It also allows us to provide proactive support for our customer ’ s customers ,” said Hadley . “ If a problem is identified that may have an impact on other merchants , our team can contact them and make them aware that a solution is being devised ahead of potential issues occurring . This sets us apart from other payment firms on the market .”
Why were you impressed with Snowflake ’ s ability to scale ?
Snowflake allows us to scale the compute horizontally and vertically , which means that whether we need more horsepower for complex queries or just the ability to handle more queries concurrently , there are cost-effective options to achieve that . This is very important for our white label model of operation , because no two tenants are the same in their volumes , features and expectations .
Can you explain how Snowflake successfully integrated with your front-end tools ?
Steven Hadley , Chief Product Officer at mx51
Future plans
With growth in merchant and transaction numbers continuing to increase , Hadley said there will be further ways in which Snowflake can support the company in the future .
“ We will be using Snowflake to support more detailed analysis and reporting of transactions for merchants ,” he said . “ This will allow merchants to do things such as altering their trading patterns or augmenting their product ranges to improve sales and revenues .” This will be achieved by enhancing a merchantfacing portal that provides a data feed from installed terminals . The dashboard will give a holistic view of the merchant ’ s payment system , as well as providing the ability to drill down to see specific transactions .
Snowflake is widely supported in the data ecosystem , so every business intelligence and visualisation tool that we currently use , including Metabase and Power BI , and even tools that we evaluated throughout our data journey had first-party support for Snowflake . The same goes for integration and workflow tools we use to load , unload and transform data in Snowflake , to surface insights in our customer-facing dashboards .
How efficient did you find the deployment process overall ?
Ease of deployment is crucial for our operations , because all infrastructure has to be provisioned separately for each tenant . As a result , we are very selective about the services we use outside of the main cloud provider , to avoid complicating the automation
www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO APAC 73