Switchboard Eliminates the Acrobatics in Continuous Data Operations
SAN FRANCISCO, CA (PRWEB) October 15, 2015 -- Making its debut at the Tableau Conference (TC15) in Las Vegas next week, Switchboard Software will demonstrate its cloud-based data operations platform. The solution provides business teams with the power to move and monitor critical data, automatically scale up to handle spikes, and rapidly present with Tableau or any other visualization analytics application – all without time-consuming requests to the IT department.
It’s a huge win for analysts, especially in areas such as digital media, who have had limited or inconsistent access to their data, have needed to assemble costly data operations teams or have been shut out completely by a lack of IT resources.
Interactions Marketing, the global leader in innovative retail services and experiential marketing for retailers and brands, will share their experience working with the platform and demo the product.
HELPING BUSINESS TEAMS ACT AS ANALYSTS, NOT PLUMBERS
“The Tableau Conference is the perfect venue for us to come out of stealth,” said Ju-kay Kwek, co-founder and CEO of Switchboard. “The ease of powerful data visualization software, such as Tableau, has put increased pressure on the process upstream to deliver. Until now, it really hasn’t. We developed Switchboard as turnkey data operations platform to relieve the pain of business teams who have struggled to get access their data.”
In 2010, Switchboard co-founders Ju-kay Kwek and Michael Manoochehri were launching Google BigQuery. As founding members of Google’s Cloud Platform team they noticed that in too many cases enterprise companies weren’t utilizing their most valuable data, even though it was often created and already stored in the cloud. It wasn’t a lack of analytics tools; the problem was relentlessly growing datasets compounded by the pain of building and operating large-scale data infrastructure. The increasing complexity of data operations put analysis beyond the reach of even some of the savviest teams.
“We envisioned a future,” Kwek recalls, “where business units didn’t need a large team of developers or IT people to stand up and maintain their analytics projects. It was about giving people the freedom to extract insights from their own data, whenever they wanted. If we could give them direct access while maintaining IT control, then they could be analysts instead of plumbers.”
The Switchboard team solved the problem by creating a massively scalable, cloud-based data operations platform that ingests unstructured data from any source. By allowing business teams to build, monitor and manage pipelines of large, dynamic datasets, they put the power of analytics and visualization back into the hands of business units. Thus freeing up IT and development resources to focus on more creative endeavors.
POWERFUL ENOUGH FOR IT, EASY ENOUGH FOR ANALYSTS
One of Switchboard’s early clients, Interactions Marketing, used the platform to eliminate the bottleneck to scaling deployments: a complex chain of legacy BI and ETL tools and weeks of IT effort to set up new projects. The result was a 10-time increase in data flow and a decrease in their overall IT spend.
“We increased our client portfolio by 300 percent while reducing project ramp-up times by 50 percent,” said David Forman, Director of BI, Interactions Marketing. “Taking on major new clients without increasing our headcount is key. The increased agility has enabled us to become more ingrained with our customers so we can deliver more of what they hire us for.”
Forman will present a case study of their experience and demonstrate Switchboard Software for the first time at TC15. Forman will talk about how his company was able to create a flexible cloud model using Tableau Online, Amazon RedShift, and Switchboard’s streamlined data operations platform, without building more infrastructure or hiring more IT personnel.
FREEING UP DATA ENGINEERS FOR MORE CREATIVE ENDEAVORS
While still in stealth mode, Switchboard worked with a number of leading-edge enterprise clients in digital media, gaming, and retail, to demonstrate the results of the platform.
“Our clients are savvy analytics pioneers. They’re Tableau power users,” Kwek said. “But they might have terabytes of data that can’t be used because it’s not in the right format. In the past, they would have needed IT to extract it by hand. Switchboard streamlines and automates the end-to-end process, letting our customers stay focused on what they do best – asking the next question and creating insights for their organization.”
By combining real-time operational visibility with a hosted platform that takes advantage of leading open-source innovations – including Apache Spark, Hadoop and Flume – clients were able to scale any number of new projects quickly and easily.
“We’re finally able to redeploy our data engineers to work on differentiating features,” said Tom Newton, Director of Social Gaming at Gamesys, “Rather than constantly maintaining infrastructure plumbing, we’re able to focus resources on our core business.”
FEATURES OF SWITCHBOARD SOFTWARE
• Built-in operations monitoring and alerting
• Full operational audit log
• Cloud-based automation, processing and storage
• Automatic scaling and tiered pricing
• Visual definition of data transformation pipelines
• Direct export to RedShift and BigQuery
• Connectivity to S3 and Google Cloud Storage
BENEFITS FOR ENTERPRISE TEAMS
• Global view of all data activity
• Increased accountability and rapid incident triage
• Get new projects running in days not months
• Constant data flow with predictable costs
• Enable business users to participate in design
• Take full advantage of cloud data analytics engines
• Eliminate manual data loading
About Switchboard Software
Switchboard Software believes that everyone should have easy, reliable, affordable access to their data. Founded in 2013 with a seed investment of $2.2M from Two Sigma Ventures, PENN Capital Management, Crunch Fund, and Antecedent Ventures, Switchboard’s team of executives and engineers from Google, LinkedIn and Facebook came together to develop a full-featured data operations platform for enterprise clients. The service is available by engaging directly with Switchboard, or via their technology partners: Google Cloud Platform and Tableau Software. Learn more about Switchboard Software at http://www.switchboard-software.com
About Interactions Marketing
Founded in 1988, Interactions is the global leader in innovative retail solutions and experiential marketing for retailers and brands. With a workforce of more than 45,000 associates around the world, Interactions creates and executes nearly 3 million events every year, managing 5,500 events each day. Interactions offers integrated sales and marketing programs that engage shoppers in-store and outdoor, and provides insights into shopper behavior and customer service that enable retailers and brands to make smarter business decisions and drive significant sales increases. The company has offices around the globe and operates in North America, Europe, South Africa, Australia and Asia. Interactions is a subsidiary of Daymon Worldwide, the world’s leading full-service, global retail branding and sourcing partner for retailers and manufacturers. For more information on Interactions, visit http://www.interactionsmarketing.com
Media Contact
Ju-kay Kwek
Switchboard Software
415.425.3660
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Ju-kay Kwek, Switchboard Software, Inc, https://www.switchboard-software.com, +1 (415) 425-3660, [email protected]
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