We talked to some of our customers to explore the different ways CloverDX is helping them tackle their biggest data challenges. Watch the videos and read the transcripts to learn more.
Improving data quality
Joe Wright: Originally they wanted me to build an ETL system myself using Python. So I started with that, but that takes a while. We needed HIPAA compliance, we needed certain capabilities. The analysts the next level up from us spend a fair amount of time doing checks on the data. They want to check to make sure that this month's numbers are relatively close to last months and they want to see the outliers. We can do that now with Data Quality.
Ken Workun: Making sure that your email addresses are up to date, that mostly it's about preventing duplicates. The worst thing that you can have is the same user in your system for different places. So a lot of what data cleanliness is about is making sure that you don't have duplicate data. That if somebody spells your name wrong, you don't end up with two entries.
Data integration
Christian Rodericks: We are very heterogeneous. So we work with close to 50 different technology partners across all areas of business, from finance, marketing, back office, risk management, order management. We use Salesforce for our sales pipeline. We use NetSuite for our financial statements. We have IBM as our technology platform provider for our core e-commerce. We use Bell in the data centre. We use Clover for our integration layer.
Christian Rodericks: The night before we turned on the site, we had basically 2.5 million products. The ability to move that kind of data, to even manipulate and think about it, you have to be very smart. You get into these big data problems. And we used the Clover tool to get us where we needed to be to launch site. And now Clover's just embedded completely into the solution and is part of our future as we scale the business even further.
Christian Rodericks: And Clover, and particularly the integration layer of Clover, helps us internally. But we can also turn upside down very quickly and then integrate with another very large retailer. If someone uses some older standards like EDI, we can open it up and plug those into the overall solution as well without sacrificing, again, the scalability, the stability, and then any other merchant that we've got together.
BI and analytics
Himanshu Verma: Typically, a lot of advanced analytics is done using statistical tools. A lot of these tools require data, which is pivoted, which is wide datasets. With uSell, that's a very interesting engagement we have with uSell. The initial problem was they were having a hard time identifying a repeat customer. You have to mine through millions of historical hits to ensure that it's the same customer which came back, not someone different. Those kinds of things.
Himanshu Verma: What I recommended to them was, what you really need is something that can work across your billions of records that you have. That's how we got engaged. That's how we brought Clover in. Clover helps us make the data in the right format. It aggregates the data to the right level, and then subsequently feed it into these tools.
Data migration
Scott Brookes: Currently, my development team were working on several different projects. Quite a few of these solutions would involve data migration needs on the customer's part as well, and that's where we look to integrate other technologies.
Ken Workun: We looked at do-it-yourself versus using tools. So the original default position was can we write scripts, do the transformation ourselves and migrate it into our own databases and do the cleansing and migration using SQL tools as a technical company, that was something that we evaluated. The challenge with that is maintaining those scripts and maintaining that approach. How we choose to use Clover will really depend on the specific requirements. If a customer is just looking for a one-time migration where he has multiple data sources that he needs to bring together, we may use them as a tool internally for ourselves as a way to deliver the service. Alternatively, if they need to do ongoing maintenance of their database, ongoing cleansing of the database, we may leave a copy of Clover technology with them in their operational environment.
