Executive summary

Client background

The client provides full-fledged e-commerce and subscription management solutions for monetizing digital goods, online services, and SaaS across various industries. The company offers a cloud-based e-commerce platform that simplifies recurring billing, optimizes customer experience, and offers comprehensive global compliance and payment capabilities.

Business challenge

The client needed to provide one of their largest customers with more precise and visually informative data analytics reports.

Sparknet approach

Our experts have started by conducting a thorough Discovery Phase to design an effective data strategy. We then formed a team that has migrated the client’s data and developed a modern data platform to build the data reporting solution.

Value delivered

Sparknet has helped the client match the need of one of their largest clients and expand their service offering by developing a new reporting solution that offers comprehensive data and analytics. We have also allowed this solution to be used internally by the client to gain valuable insights about their clients’ performance and enhance their business decision-making process.

Success story in detail

Business challenge: expanding the service offering with effective data analytics reporting

As an all-in-one e-commerce provider, the client is continuously looking for solutions to meet every customer need. Therefore, to satisfy the request of their largest customer, the client began improving the analytics solution and looked for assistance from a tech partner with the right expertise. The main task was to enhance the tool that provides reports on client’s subscription (i.e., revenue, number of new customers) and complement it with more visually informative data.

Sparknet approach: designing a data strategy with the help of an extensive Product Discovery

Our team has designed a data strategy with a clear implementation plan of the reporting solution that uses Power BI. This was achieved by performing an extensive Discovery Phase, during which the team interviewed the client’s stakeholders and examined existing processes. We have used the obtained implementation plan to build a modern data platform based on AWS and establish effective data governance.

Implementation: building an AWS data platform and utilizing Power BI

Our team has used AWS DMS to retrieve data from the client’s on-premise Oracle database in near-real-time mode. This has allowed our experts to receive CDC data (Change Data Capture) as soon as possible and build upstream tables based on all occurred changes. They have also used the already implemented Dynamics 365 as the second source of data, which is retrieved with the help of the Dynamics 365 REST API.

All data is transferred to AWS S3, where it moves through 3 layers: bronze (raw data ingestion), silver (filtered, cleaned, and transformed data), and gold (business level aggregates). The movement of data between these layers is attained through the use of Apache Spark, an analytics engine for data processing. Data from the business layer is also moved to Snowflake, a data warehouse, where it can be served to Power BI. Our experts can then use their extensive knowledge in Power BI to build informative Business Intelligence reports for the client’s customers.

Sparknet team has also helped the client significantly improve their data security by establishing effective data governance. This data governance is separated into two parts, one being based on AWS, and another one – on Snowflake.

Value delivered by Sparknet: growing the customer base by expanding the analytical capabilities of the offered solution

By developing the comprehensive data analytics solution, Sparknet has helped the client match the need of one of their largest customers and expand their services by making the solution a part of their product offering. The client has also gained several additional benefits:

• Increased their value proposition with a universal reporting solution and helped them attract more customers;
• Boosted information security by establishing effective data governance of the developed data platform;
• Enhanced business decision-making capabilities by allowing to use the solution internally to gain insights about client performance.