Customer story – Bob Collie

Lights on data modernization podcast

We like that Lyftrondata allowed us to just state, "Here's a source, here's a destination, and it has a way," rather than requiring us to first define the data.

Bob Collie – Bob Collie is a board member of IT Renew and the chief technology advisor of Zmclp

About Bob

Bob pursued an economics degree at Vanderbilt University. He presently serves as ZMC's representative on the IT Renew Board. At AdThrive, formerly known as Dynasty Sports and Entertainment and Education Networks of America, he collaborates with the management teams. He has more than 20 years of expertise in strategy, technology implementation, and leadership. Additionally, he has held several positions at Education Networks of America, PsiNet, and Tele-link Corporation, including Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Strategy.

The business

ZMC, which was established in 2001, has extensive expertise in carrying out private equity investments in the communications and media sectors. ZMC invests with a collaboration and passion mindset. ZMC invests with a collaboration and passion mindset. With a strong belief in investing, ZMC collaborates closely with the businesses in its portfolio to create value as a group. One of ZMC's portfolio companies, ITRenew, has been optimizing the lifetime value of data center technology for over 20 years by employing cutting-edge circular economic models and offering a wide range of services, including data security and decommissioning, edge and component products, and rack-scale compute and storage solutions. ITRenew provides best-of-breed decommissioning, data security, engineering, and remanufacturing services on a truly global scale. The company has facilities in all key data center markets. With its headquarters in Silicon Valley, ITRenew has worked with the biggest hyper-scale data centers worldwide to develop, create, and customize solutions constantly.

The difficulty

Since the company is committed to environmental sustainability, good governance, and the circular economy, it was necessary to make effective data-driven decisions. The main objectives are to minimize e-waste, handle e-waste well, and maximize client results.

Wits is the name of the proprietary internal system used by IT Renew. It assists in validating input and is based on an SQL server. To make sure that their equipment is effectively sold, the corporation must make sure that data is returned to the clients who are providing them with the equipment on a consignment basis.

The most crucial element in IT Renew's ability to assess, measure, and evaluate its equipment to optimize value for both clients and the business is data. Every piece of information is found in the underlying systems, which are covered in a layer of Microsoft Business Central 365. Salesforce is used by the sales team to learn about products and the work that is done with hyperscalers. Keeping supply, demand, and price in balance is the major difficulty. As a result, the business encountered the following difficulties:

Information availability and staff adoption of digital platforms

Data had to be made available in Tableau and Wits, coming from various sources. Together with other crucial information that helps the business cut expenses, allocate labor for increased production, and decide whether to alter, sell, or trash things, this also includes dynamic data.

Deploying

There was no mechanism to input that into a data warehouse, even after Business Central was deployed in the Dynamics 365 environment. The business then attempted to transfer back-end components into an Azure SQL data warehouse using Power Automate, however there were significant quality problems.

User-friendly

Power Automate might be a very user-friendly solution for simpler jobs, but for IT Renew, it was ineffective because there was no real means for a data analyst to comprehend data and implement a new data pipeline in the warehouse to meet changing requirements.

How Lyftrondata helped?

Lyftrondata is mostly used by the business for data transformation. All components were effortlessly integrated via Lyftrondata. It assisted in doing away with the laborious process of creating unique codes and team training.

Their team in Tableau can swiftly collect and analyze data by using Lyftrondata to establish automated data pipelines from Business Central, Salesforce, and Witz. Bob added, "There is a good amount of capacity and capability to actually kind of get ad-hoc queries within the Lyftrondata environment," which further helped to simplify the work of the data analysts by bridging the gap between the data source and data destination and providing incremental loads. We can easily carry out the incremental changes thanks to the Lyftrondata environment.

"There is a good amount of capacity and capability to actually kind of get ad-hoc queries within the Lyftrondata environment. Lyftrondata environment allows us to do the incremental updates on a straightforward basis."

"The onboarding was very fast and the nice part of it is we did not have to involve a deeper set of our IT team to do that", says Bob who further explains that it took less than 2 weeks to onboard with Lyftrondata and did not require any tedious efforts from the team to start working with it. The company just had to put the ETL capabilities in the hands of the respective persons and departments and work was simplified!

“The Lyftrondata team already had good adapters for Salesforce so we were able to get there in a matter of minutes frankly. Once our team connected to the salesforce instance and got the security credentials, we didn’t need a data architect or an ETL developer. What we have is somewhere between a data analyst and a BI analyst. This team was able to suck in the data directly from Salesforce and create very meaningful reports against it in our data warehouse in a day.” –Bob Collie

Bob mentioned:

“We just had to define the endpoint which was business central to find the endpoint which is Salesforce and then tell it to refresh its metadata inside of Lyftrondata and that entire catalog of data became available and at that point moving it from there to our data warehouse was a point-and-click solution. No code was written on our end."

Further, Bob explains that:

“ Our challenge was finding Lyftrondata in the space and once we’ve now found it, it’s an integral part of what we’re doing. We’re principally using Lyftrondata for data transformation, however, we’re aware of the other capabilities it has and that was part of why we chose it."

Lyftrondata simplified the process of extracting, transforming, and loading data into the target warehouse. The manual efforts of drafting and maintaining reports were eliminated, saving valuable time. The data transformation process was streamlined, taking only a few minutes regardless of the number of rows and columns. The ETL architecture was tailored to the needs of the company and worked seamlessly with the cloud. Making changes to the data and updating specific products was effortless, without disrupting the workflow.

“ The role of data engineers is changing because of tools such as Lyftrondata, I feel it’s kind of putting these capabilities in the hands of non-technical individuals. –Bob Collie"

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