How Deutsche Bank used Cloud Composer to orchestrate workloads for financial services - Build What's Next
Case Study

How Deutsche Bank used Cloud Composer to orchestrate workloads for financial services

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Deutsche Bank introduced Cloud Composer into its application landscape as a strategic workflow orchestration product. Read about how you can use Cloud Composer to manage your workloads.

Running time-based, scheduled workflows to implement business processes is regular practice at many financial services companies. This is true for Deutsche Bank, where the execution of workflows is fundamental for many applications across its various business divisions, including the Private Bank, Investment and Corporate Bank as well as internal functions like Risk, Finance and Treasury. These workflows often execute scripts on relational databases, run application code in various languages (for example Java), and move data between different storage systems. The bank also uses big data technologies to gain insights from large amounts of data, where Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) workflows running on Hive, Impala and Spark play a key role.

Historically, Deutsche Bank used both third-party workflow orchestration products and open-source tools to orchestrate these workflows. But using multiple tools increases complexity and introduces operational overhead for managing underlying infrastructure and workflow tools themselves.

Cloud Composer, on the other hand, is a fully managed offering that allows customers to orchestrate all these workflows with a single product. Deutsche Bank recently began introducing Cloud Composer into its application landscape, and continues to use it in more and more parts of the business.

“Cloud Composer is our strategic workload automation (WLA) tool. It enables us to further drive an engineering culture and represents an intentional move away from the operations-heavy focus that is commonplace in traditional banks with traditional technology solutions. The result is engineering for all production scenarios up front, which reduces risk for our platforms that can suffer from reactionary manual interventions in their flows. Cloud Composer is built on open-source Apache Airflow, which brings with it the promise of portability for a hybrid multi-cloud future, a consistent engineering experience for both on-prem and cloud-based applications, and a reduced cost basis.

We have enjoyed a great relationship with the Google team that has resulted in the successful migration of many of our scheduled applications onto Google Cloud using Cloud Composer in production.” – Richard Manthorpe, Director Workload Automation, Deutsche Bank

Why use Cloud Composer in financial services

Financial services companies want to focus on implementing their business processes, not on managing infrastructure and orchestration tools. In addition to consolidating multiple workflow orchestration technologies into one and thus reducing complexity, there are a number of other reasons companies choose Cloud Composer as a strategic workflow orchestration product.

First of all, Cloud Composer is significantly more cost-effective than traditional workflow management and orchestration solutions. As a managed service, Google takes care of all environment configuration and maintenance activities. Cloud Composer version 2 introduces autoscaling, which allows for an optimized resource utilization and improved cost control, since customers only pay for the resources used by their workflows. And because Cloud Composer is based on open source Apache Airflow, there are no license fees; customers only pay for the environment that it runs on, adjusting the usage to current business needs.

Highly regulated industries like financial services must comply with domain-specific security and governance tools and policies. For example, Customer-Managed Encryption Keys ensure that data won’t be accessed without the organization’s consent, while Virtual Private Network Service Controls mitigate the risk of data exfiltration. Cloud Composer supports these and many other security and governance controls out-of-the box, making it easy for customers in regulated industries to use the service without having to implement these policies on their own.

The ability to orchestrate both native Google Cloud as well as on-prem workflows is another reason that Deutsche Bank chose Cloud Composer. Cloud Composer uses Airflow Operators (connectors for interacting with outside systems) to integrate with Google Cloud services like BigQuery, Dataproc, Dataflow, Cloud Functions and others, as well as hybrid and multi-cloud workflows. Airflow Operators also integrate with Oracle databases, on-prem VMs, sFTP file servers and many others, provided by Airflow’s strong open-source community.

And while Cloud Composer lets customers consolidate multiple workflow orchestration tools into one, there are some use cases where it’s just not the right fit. For example, if customers have just a single job that executes once a day on a fixed schedule, Cloud Scheduler, Google Cloud’s managed service for Cron jobs, might be a better fit. Cloud Composer in turn excels for more advanced workflow orchestration scenarios.

Finally, technologies based on open source technologies also provide a simple exit strategy from cloud — an important regulatory requirement for financial services companies. With Cloud Composer, customers can simply move their Airflow workflows from Cloud Composer to a self-managed Airflow cluster. Because Cloud Composer is fully compatible with Apache Airflow, the workflow definitions stay exactly the same if they are moved to a different Airflow cluster.

Cloud Composer applied

Having looked at why Deutsche Bank chose Cloud Composer, let’s dive into how the bank is actually using it today. Apache Airflow is well-suited for ETL and data engineering workflows thanks to the rich set of data Operators (connectors) it provides. So Deutsche Bank, where a large-scale data lake is already in place on-prem, leverages Cloud Composer for its modern Cloud Data Platform, whose main aim is to work as an exchange for well-governed data, and enable a “data mesh” pattern.

At Deutsche Bank, Cloud Composer orchestrates the ingestion of data to the Cloud Data Platform, which is primarily based on BigQuery. The ingestion happens in an event-driven manner, i.e., Cloud Composer does not simply run load jobs based on a time-schedule; instead it reacts to events when new data such as Cloud Storage objects arrives from upstream sources. It does so using so-called Airflow Sensors, which continuously watch for new data. Besides loading data into BigQuery, Composer also schedules ETL workflows, which transform data to derive insights for business reporting.

Due to the rich set of Airflow Operators, Cloud Composer can also orchestrate workflows that are part of standard, multi-tier business applications running non-data-engineering workflows. One of the use cases includes a swap reporting platform that provides information about various asset classes, including commodities, credits, equities, rates and Forex. In this application, Cloud Composer orchestrates various services implementing the business logic of the application and deployed on Cloud Run — again, using out-of-the-box Airflow Operators.

These use cases are already running in production and delivering value to Deutsche Bank. Here is how their Cloud Data Platform team sees the adoption of Cloud Composer:

“Using Cloud Composer allows our Data Platform team to focus on creating Data Engineering and ETL workflows instead of on managing the underlying infrastructure. Since Cloud Composer runs Apache Airflow, we can leverage out of the box connectors to systems like BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataproc and others, making it well-embedded into the entire Google Cloud ecosystem.”Balaji Maragalla, Director Big Data Platforms, Deutsche Bank

Want to learn more about how to use Cloud Composer to orchestrate your own workloads? Check out this Quickstart guide or Cloud Composer documentation today.

Trend Analysis

Four Key Takeaways from Google and Quantum Metric’s Back-to-School Retail Benchmark Study

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Google research and Quantum Metric's Back-to-School study on the U.S. retail data helps identify pain points and improve search and personalization for shoppers as they prep up for post-holiday season. Read this blogpost for more insights!

Is it September yet? Hardly! School is barely out for the summer. But according to Google and Quantum Metric research, the back-to-school and off-to-college shopping season – which in the U.S. is second only to the holidays in terms of purchasing volume1 – has already begun. For retailers, that means planning for this peak season has kicked off as well.

We’d like to share four key trends that emerged from Google research and Quantum Metric’s Back-to-School Retail Benchmarks study of U.S. retail data, explore the reasons behind them, and outline the key takeaways.

  1. Out-of-stock and inflation concerns are changing the way consumers shop. Back-to-school shoppers are starting earlier every year, with 41% beginning even before school is out – even more so when buying for college1. Why? The behavior is driven in large part by consumers’ concerns that they won’t be able to get what they need if they wait too long. 29% of shoppers start looking a full month before they need something1.

Back-to-school purchasing volume is quite high, with the majority spending up to $500 and 21% spending more than $1,0001. In fact, looking at year-over-year data, we see that average cart values have not only doubled since November 2021, but increased since the holidays1. And keep in mind that back-to-school spending is a key indicator leading into the holiday season.

That said, as people are reacting to inflation, they are comparing prices, hunting for bargains, and generally taking more time to plan. This is borne out by the fact that 76% of online shoppers are adding items to their carts and waiting to see if they go on sale before making the purchase1. And, to help stay on budget and reduce shipping costs, 74% plan to make multiple purchases in one checkout1. That carries over to in-store shopping, when consumers are buying more in one visit to reduce trips and save on gas.

2. The omnichannel theme continues. Consumers continue to use multiple channels in their shopping experience. As the pandemic has abated, some 82% expect that their back-to-school buying will be in-store, and 60% plan to purchase online. But in any case, 45% of consumers report that they will use both channels; more than 50% research online first before ever setting foot in a store2. Some use as many as five channels, including video and social media, and these 54% of consumers spend 1.5 times more compared to those who use only two channels4.

And mobile is a big part of the journey. Shoppers are using their phones to make purchases, especially for deadline-driven, last-minute needs, and often check prices on other retailers’ websites while shopping in-store. Anecdotally, mobile is a big part of how we ourselves shop with our children, who like to swipe on the phone through different options for colors and styles. We use our desktops when shopping on our own, especially for items that require research and represent a larger investment – and our study shows that’s quite common.

3. Consumers are making frequent use of wish lists. One trend we have observed is a higher abandonment rate, especially for apparel and general home and school supplies, compared to bigger-ticket items that require more research. But that can be attributed in part to the increasing use of wish lists. Online shoppers are picking a few things that look appealing or items on sale, saving them in wish lists, and then choosing just a few to purchase. Our research shows that 39% of consumers build one or two wish lists per month, while 28% said they build one or two each week, often using their lists to help with budgeting1.

4. Frustration rates have dropped significantly. Abandonment rates aside, shopper annoyance rates are down by 41%, year over year1. This is despite out-of-stock concerns and higher prices. But one key finding showed that both cart abandonment and “rage clicks” are more frequent on desktops, possibly because people investing time on search also have more time to complain to customer service.

And frustration does still exist. Some $300 billion is lost each year in the U.S. from bad search experiences5. Data collected internationally shows that 80% of consumers view a brand differently after experiencing search difficulties, and 97% favor websites where they can quickly find what they are looking for5.

Lessons to Learn


What are the key takeaways for retailers? In general, consider the sources of customer pain points and find ways to erase friction. Improve search and personalization. And focus on improving the customer experience and building loyalty. Specifically:

80% of shoppers want personalization6. Think about how you can drive personalized promotions or experiences that will drive higher engagement with your brand.

46% of consumers want more time to research1. Drive toward providing more robust research and product information points, like comparison charts, images, and specific product details.

43% of consumers want a discount1, but given current economic trends, retailers may not be offering discounts. In order to appease budget-conscious shoppers, retailers can consider other retention strategies such as driving loyalty using points, rewards, or faster-shipping perks.

Be sure to keep returns as simple as possible so consumers feel confident when making a purchase, and reduce possible friction points if a consumer decides to make a return. 43% of shoppers return at least a quarter of the products they buy and do not want to pay for shipping or jump through hoops1.

How We Can Help


Google-sponsored research shows that price, deals, and promotions are important to 68% of back-to-school shoppers.7 In addition, shoppers want certainty that they will get what they want. Google Cloud can make it easier for retailers to enable customers to find the right products with discovery solutions. These solutions provide Google-quality search and recommendations on a retailer’s own digital properties, helping to increase conversions and reduce search abandonment. In addition, Quantum Metric solutions, available on the Google Cloud Marketplace, are built with BigQuery, which helps retailers consolidate and unlock the power of their raw data to identify areas of friction and deliver improved digital shopping experiences.

We invite you to watch the Total Retail webinar “4 ways retailers can get ready for back-to-school, off-to college” on demand and to view the full Back-to-School Retail Benchmarks report from Quantum Metric.

Sources:
1. Back-to-School Retail Benchmarks report from Quantum Metric
2. Google/Ipsos,Moments 2021, Jun 2021, Online survey, US, n=335 Back to School shoppers
3. Google/Ipsos, Moments 2021, Jun 2021, Online survey, US, n=2,006 American general population 18+
4. Google/Ipsos, Holiday Shopping Study, Oct 2021 – Jan 2022, Online survey, US, n=7,253, Americans 18+ who conducted holiday shopping activities in past two days
5. Google Cloud Blog, Nov 2021, “Research: Search abandonment has a lasting impact on brand loyalty”
6. McKinsey & Company, “Personalizing the customer experience: Driving differentiation in retail”
7. Think with Google, July 2021, “What to expect from shoppers this back-to-school season”

Case Study

1 Developer. 5 Months. A Revenue Generating App With 100K Users With Firebase

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When Anton Ivanov, today the Founder & CEO of DealCheck, set out to single-handedly build one of a property analysis service, he wasn't sure he could do it alone. Thanks to Firebase, he did. In just 5 months. And then he scaled the business to be one of the most popular services in the segment.

This is a guest post authored by Firebase customer, Anton Ivanov, Founder & CEO of DealCheck

Real estate investing is a fantastic way to build a stream of passive income and grow your wealth. Numerous studies have pointed out that real estate investing has created more millionaires throughout history than any other form of investing (like this one and this one). So why don’t more people do it?

I asked myself this very question a few years ago after talking to a group of friends about the success I’ve had with real estate, and listening to their reasons why they think it’s out of their reach.

A common theme among them was that they viewed it as something too difficult to learn and master. There were too many steps, the learning curve was steep and there was a lot of room for mistakes for somebody just starting out, especially when analyzing the financial performance of potential investment properties.

Traditionally, most investors used spreadsheets to do the math – which works only if you know what and how you’re calculating something. But if you don’t know that, it’s very easy to make mistakes and overlook things. And no one wants to make mathematical errors before a huge purchase like an investment property.

analysis spreadsheet

Where do I even begin?!

And that’s when I had the idea to build DealCheck – a cloud-based, easy-to-use property analysis tool for real estate investors and agents. I wanted to create a platform that would help new investors learn the ropes and avoid costly mistakes, but at the same time provide the flexibility to perform more advanced analysis with a click of a button.

dealcheck home screen

Making real estate investing easier and more accessible.

The Challenges of Solo Development

I was working as a front-end engineer at the time, so I knew I could build the UI myself, but what about the back-end, data storage, authentication, and a bunch of other things you need for a full-functioning cloud app?

I didn’t know anybody I could bring on as a co-founder, so I set out to research what technologies and platforms I could leverage to help me with the back-end and server infrastructure.

Firebase kept popping up again and again and I began to look at it in more detail. It was then recently acquired by Google and its collection of BaaS (backend-as-a-service) modules seemed to offer the exact solution I needed to build DealCheck.

I was especially impressed with the documentation for each feature and how well all of the different technologies could be tied together to create one unified platform.

It wasn’t long before I signed up and started building the first MVP of the app.

Using Firebase to Quickly Build a Scalable Backend

As the only developer on the project, I had limited time and resources to spend on building the back-end, so I set out to use every Firebase feature that was available at the time to my advantage.

My goal was actually to write as little server-side code as possible and instead focus on leveraging the different Firebase modules to solve three specific challenges:

Challenge #1 – Authentication and User Management

The first one was authentication and user management. DealCheck’s users needed the ability to create their accounts so they can view and analyze properties on any device (more on that later). I wanted to have the ability to sign in with email, Facebook or a Google account.

Firebase Authentication was designed specifically for this purpose and I used it to handle pretty much the entire authentication flow. Out-of-the-box, it has support for all the major social networks, cross-network credential linking and the basic account management operations like email changes, password resets and account deletions.

There was no server-side code required at all – I just needed to build the UI on the front-end.

Email, Facebook and Google sign in powered by Firebase.

Email, Facebook and Google sign in powered by Firebase.

And as an added benefit, Firebase Authentication ties directly into the Realtime Database product to create a declarative permissions and access control framework that’s easy to implement and maintain. This helped me make sure user data was protected from unauthorized access, but also facilitate data sharing among users.

Challenge #2 – Cloud Storage with Cross-Device Sync

Next up was data storage. I knew that I wanted DealCheck’s users to be able to use the app and analyze properties online, on iOS and Android. So I needed a real-time, cloud-based database solution that could sync data across any device.

Syncing data across web and mobile

Syncing data across web and mobile is not easy!

Firebase Realtime Database is a NoSQL, JSON-based database solution that was designed exactly for this purpose, and I was actually surprised how great it worked. I used the official AngularJS bindings for Firebase on the front-end to read and write to it directly from the client.

I had to do some extra work on mobile to implement an offline mode with syncing after reconnections, but all-together the code required to make everything work was minimal.

As I mentioned, Firebase Authentication tied directly to the database to facilitate access control, so I really didn’t need to do anything extra there. And I was able to set up automatic daily backups of all the data with a click of a button.

Challenge #3 – Third-Party Integrations

Up to now, I had written exactly 0 lines of server-side code and everything was handled by the client directly. As DealCheck’s development progressed, however, I knew that I would need a server to handle some operations that could not be done in the client.

I wasn’t very experienced with server maintenance and DevOps, but fortunately the Firebase Cloud Functions product was able to solve all of my needs. Cloud Functions are essentially single-purpose functions that can be triggered (or executed) based on a specific HTTP request or events coming from the Authentication, Realtime Database or other Firebase products.

Each function can be run once based on a specific event trigger to perform its prescribed task. You don’t have to worry about provisioning a server instance or managing load – everything is done automatically for you by Firebase.

What’s even cooler, is that Cloud Functions can access the Realtime Database and Cloud Storage buckets of the same project, performing operations on them server-side, as needed.

This is how DealCheck processes subscription payments through Stripe, validates Apple and Google Play mobile subscription receipts, integrates with third-party APIs and updates database records without user interaction.

Dealcheck website

Bringing in sales comparable data from third-party providers into DealCheck.

Cloud Functions became the “glue” that tied the entire back-end infrastructure together.

Growing from an MVP to 100,000 Users with Firebase

The first version of the DealCheck app was built and launched in less than 5 months with just me on the development team. I definitely don’t think that would have been possible without Firebase powering the back-end infrastructure. Maybe the project wouldn’t have ever launched at all.

While Firebase is awesome for quick MVP development, it’s definitely designed to power production applications at scale as well. As DealCheck grew from a small side-project to one of the most popular real estate apps with over 100k users, all of the Firebase products that we use scaled to support the increasing load.

Moreover, the fantastic interoperability of all Firebase modules allows us to develop and release new features much faster because of the reduced coding requirements and ease of configuration.

So next time you’re looking to build an ambitious project with a small team – take a look at how Firebase can help you reduce development time and provide a suite of powerful tools that scale as your business grows.

This is exactly how DealCheck grew from a simple idea to make property analysis easier and faster, to an app that is helping tens of thousands of people grow their wealth and passive income through real estate investing. It’s a truly awesome and fulfilling experience to see your work positively impact so many people and it wouldn’t have been possible without Firebase.

Blog

Key Highlights on Data Analytics to Smooth Your Organization’s Data Journey

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Take a look back at the recent highlights in BigQuery and other trends in data analytics to ease your data journey so that you get to take home the gold in all-round data competition! Read more.

As the Olympics kicked off in Tokyo at the end of July, we found ourselves reflecting on the beauty of diverse countries and cultures coming together to celebrate greatness and sportsmanship. For this month’s blog, we’d like to highlight some key data and analytics performances that should help inspire you to reach new heights in your data journey.

Let’s review the highlights!

BigQuery ML Anomaly Detection: A perfect 10 for augmented analytics

Identifying anomalous behavior at scale is a critical component of any analytics strategy. Whether you want to work with a single frame of data or a time series progression, BigQuery ML allows you to bring the power of machine learning to your data warehouse. 

In this blog released at the beginning of last month, our team walked through both non-time series and time-series approaches to anomaly detection in BigQuery ML:

These approaches make it easy for your team to quickly experiment with data stored in BigQuery to identify what works best for your particular anomaly detection needs. Once a model has been identified as the right fit, you can easily port that model into the Vertex AI platform for real-time analysis or schedule it in BigQuery for continued batch processing.

App Analytics: Winning the team event

Google provides a broad ecosystem of technologies and services aimed at solving modern day challenges. Some of the best solutions come when those technologies are combined with our data analytics offerings to surface additional insights and provide new opportunities. 

Firebase has deep adoption in the app development community and provides the technology backbone for many organization’s app strategy. This month we launched a design pattern that shows Firebase customers how to use Crashlytics data, CRM, issue tracking, and support data in BigQuery and Looker to identify opportunities to improve app quality and enhance customer experiences.

Image 3

Crux on BigQuery: Taking gold in the all-around data competition

Crux Informatics provides data services to many large companies to help their customers make smarter business decisions. While they were already operating on a modern stack and not on the hunt for a modern data warehouse, BigQuery became an enticing option due to performance and a more optimal pricing model. Crux also found advantages with lower-cost ingestion and processing engines like Dataflow that allow for streaming analytics.… when it came to building a centralized large-scale data cloud, we needed to invest in a solution that would not only suit our current data storage needs but also enable us to tackle what’s coming, supporting a massive ecosystem of data delivery and operations for thousands of companies.Mark Etherington
Chief Technology Office, Crux Informatics

Technology is a team sport, and Crux found our support team responsive and ready to help. This decision to more deeply adopt Google Cloud’s data analytics offerings provides Crux with the flexibility to manage a constantly evolving data ecosystem and stay competitive.

You can read more about Crux’s decision to adopt BigQuery in this blog.

Following up on the launch of our Google Trends dataset in June, we delivered some examples of how to use that data to augment your decision making. 

As a quick recap of that dataset, Google Cloud, and in particular BigQuery, provide access to the top 25 trending terms by Nielsen’s Designated Market Area® (DMA) with a weekly granularity. These trending terms are based on search patterns and have historically only been available on the Google Trends website.https://www.youtube.com/embed/9FJAXMF0ASc?enablejsapi=1&

The Google Trends design pattern addresses some common business needs, such as identifying what’s trending geographically near your stores and how to match trending terms to products to identify potential campaigns. 

Dataflow GPU: More power than ever for those streaming sprints

Dataflow is our fully-managed data processing platform that supports both batch and streaming workloads. The ability of Dataflow to scale and easily manage unbounded data has made it the streaming solution of choice for large workloads with high-speed needs in Google Cloud. 

But what if we could take that speed and provide even more processing power for advanced use cases? Our team, in partnership with NVIDIA, did just that by adding GPU support to Dataflow. This allows our customers to easily accelerate compute-intensive processing like image analysis and predictive forecasting with amazing increases in efficiency and speed. 

Take a look at the times below:

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Data Fusion: A play-by-play for data integration’s winning performance

Data Fusion provides Google Cloud customers with a single place to perform all kinds of data integration activities. Whether it’s ETL, ELT, or simply integrating with a cloud application, Data Fusion provides a clean UI and streamlined experience with deep integrations to other Google Cloud data systems. Check out our team’s review of this tool and the capabilities it can bring to your organization.

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Case Study

Quantum Metric Increases Business 10-fold

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Would your company like access to a system which you can ask: "Show me high-loyalty customers, located in specific geographic areas, who visited the web site at least five times, based on specific campaigns, and never booked a seat on a flight.” Read this.

At Quantum Metric, we’re in the business of bringing our customers business insights that are based on customer experience data and analytics for mid-market and Fortune 500 companies.

Our software, powered by big data, machine intelligence, and Google Cloud, helps our customers identify, quantify, prioritize and measure opportunities to improve digital experiences.

As companies move to a more agile product lifecycle, including continuous deployment and continuous integration, they’re finding that it’s critical to receive perpetual quantified feedback and insights from their data in real time to understand where the largest opportunities exist. 

Each year, billions of customer interactions are captured through browsers or mobile apps on PCs, tablets, and mobile devices. This data, fed into the Quantum Metric platform, can show if a customer had a password problem they couldn’t solve or struggled when trying to purchase something and abandoned their cart.

It also can show if the customer tried in vain to complete an online change to their service provider’s subscription, to reach tech support, or couldn’t find the size or color they were looking for while shopping online.

Most importantly, the Quantum Metric platform quantifies the business value of the issue, helping organizations prioritize where they can make the largest impact to their business.

Success overwhelms our initial architecture
Initially, the Quantum Metric experience analytics software ran on a MySQL open source relational database management system (RDBMS). The MySQL RDBMS worked great for simple queries, when there was a specific question to ask of the data.

Soon, though, we knew we needed to offer more advanced data science capabilities. Our bigger customers wanted to ask questions across very large data sets—days, weeks, months, and years worth of data. They wanted to pose iterative questions using complex filters to answer their most challenging business questions. 

With more complex queries across more data, response times from our RDBMS went from 100 to 500 milliseconds to as long as 20 minutes.

That delay was slowing down our ability and time to insights, which also reduced the value we could provide to our customers, since iterative exploration and analysis requires real-time query responses. Because of the need for real-time responses, there were certain questions that we just weren’t able to ask of the data. It became clear that we needed a much more robust data warehouse solution. 

There were also operational challenges with MySQL and massive-scale data ingestion. We spent a lot of time into the wee hours of the night and morning handling errors and recovering databases.

We tried to address these challenges by sharding, partitioning, and indexing the data to optimize for the types of questions customers were asking. But the problems were escalating and happening more often, from once a month across the customer base to monthly for at least 20 different customers.

We could tune the platform for today and tomorrow’s workload, with good guesses at where indexes could be used, but we simply couldn’t continue to horizontally scale MySQL in a cost-efficient and operationally efficient manner. 

Speed breeds innovation
Once we started exploring options that could better scale with our business, we looked at NoSQL technologies like Cassandra (a partitioned row-store database), MySQL’s Column Store (a columnar store database), and Vertica (a columnar store database)—each with unique ways of handling data storage and accessibility.

But with high volumes of complex queries across large data stores, all of these solutions began to fail, bogged down with multiple, simultaneous users. We could have solved the problems with more raw compute and storage, but it would have been prohibitively expensive to run and require a large team to operate. 

We then decided to try BigQuery, and it was transformative.

We connected our front end to BigQuery via APIs. Once data is 15 minutes old, it is automatically extracted, loaded, and transformed (ETL) to BigQuery.

We continuously update the legacy MySQL RDBMS so its data is integrated with BigQuery data when queries require real-time data. Most query response times are within 100-200 milliseconds, matching what we initially experienced with MySQL.

When traffic from our customers scales up, we can now scale on-demand to accommodate it, thanks to BigQuery’s hundreds of thousands of CPUs. Our customers no longer run into slow response times, and we’ve gained confidence that we can offer them—and their users—advanced insights and better experiences without delay.

More importantly, with this scale of query power, we were able to build data science algorithms into the platform, which iteratively query BigQuery based on the results, and help quantify the impact of a specific issue to a specific segment of users. Adding these capabilities was possible because of the massive scale of BigQuery. 

In addition to new insights and fast response times, we wanted our customers to be able to ask complex questions using very simple language.

For example: “Show me high-loyalty customers, located in specific geographic areas, who visited the web site at least five times, based on specific campaigns, and never booked a seat on a flight.”

This was exactly the kind of query that was used by a major U.S. airline to understand the multi-million dollar impact of a failure affecting their most valuable customers: their high-loyalty members.

And this was all done while maintaining the highest standard of care of customer data and privacy by default, using multiple layers of encryption of data in transit, at rest, and a unique military-grade encryption approach. This approach encrypts PII, including even session cookies, with a RSA-2048 key available only to a select few and used for use cases such as fraud analysis.   

It’s no exaggeration to say that BigQuery has totally transformed our business. It provides the petabyte scale and speed we were missing, in addition to taking care of operational maintenance, a task that was burying our team with MySQL.

We’re now able to support some of the largest companies in the world that require real-time, petabyte-scale analytics. That lets them serve more customers faster with higher quality, and take advantage of BigQuery’s power and scale to innovate.

There are other cloud solutions that can address petabyte analytics, but the most unique value proposition of BigQuery was its on-demand scaling and operational management, with extremely cost-effective pay-as-you-go billing. While today we are at a scale where we have round-the-clock querying needs, our early days had very sporadic query loads where we needed instant scale, then a long lull of nothing. The unique business model of BigQuery’s pay-by-bytes-scanned allowed us to have access to a massive-scale querying platform without breaking the bank. 

Using BigQuery powers better customer experience and reduces purchasing friction
Among the many features of Quantum Metric is the ability to replay online customer sessions. In the example below from a mobile e-commerce site, each action is displayed chronologically. Why did this customer’s transaction fail?

Diving deeper, the session replay shows that the user tried to change the item quantity in the checkout cart, which resulted in a failed API call. Powered by BigQuery, Quantum Metric can then show how many other end users had this issue, with a simple click of “Show More Errors Like This.”

With BigQuery’s massive scale, Quantum Metric will then quantify the impact of that issue, so companies can prioritize which issues need attention immediately. If this is the issue that’s impacting the business the most, our customer can use a single click to open a Jira ticket, forwarding the discovery to their product and engineering teams. Those teams can then re-engineer the experience in near-real time, addressing the failed API call and cutting out the frustrating time it takes for engineers to reproduce the issue.

Quantum Metric platform.png

Once we had a powerful back end in BigQuery, we realized that Quantum Metric’s platform could be used to ask complex questions from vast datasets. We built some of the processes that data scientists use to formulate those queries right into our product.  

For example, we added one series of processes to our platform to help customers understand whether a suspect issue is really impacting end-user experience. Is it something that should be prioritized and fixed? Does this really affect the user experience? Does it have financial impact? These and other questions can be pre-defined as a complex query in Quantum Metric to let our customer quickly gain insight on how an issue is impacting the business. Customers were blown away when they heard this was possible. It was the holy grail for what they were looking for in data science. It really sets us apart from our competition.

Today, with every company heavily dependent on data, those companies that can uncover and act on insights fastest are the ones that will succeed. BigQuery gives us the data warehouse platform we need to provide our customers with fast, reliable technology tools. It frees us from having to deal with the minutiae of technology infrastructure operations, so we can focus on finding and extracting the magic in customer data. With the power and scale of BigQuery, combined with the real-time capture of every user experience with 100% fidelity, we’re able to offer a self-service analytics platform that provides insights into digital journey friction points and acts as the indisputable arbitrator of truth. 

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Qlik and Google Cloud Combo: Extending Integration of SAP Data on BigQuery

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Data integration challenges plague almost 52% of companies with SAP workloads and systems. Qlik Data integration for Google Cloud helps customers accelerate the delivery of SAP data on BigQuery.

If your organization is one of the 52% of SAP customers whose top analytics pain point is data integration1, Google Cloud has got you covered. By working with partners like Qlik, we are expanding our integration options and bringing real-time replication capability for SAP to BigQuery.

Integrated data for accelerated insights

BigQuery—our fully managed, enterprise data warehouse that can scale up to petabytes on demand and execute queries in seconds—allows SAP customers to consolidate enterprise data silos and confidently derive more use and value from their data.  Customers can accelerate and simplify the delivery of SAP data on BigQuery with the latest Qlik Data Integration platform offering for Google Cloud which allows data integration using an automated, near real-time data pipeline through Qlik Replicate, whether data originates from legacy SAP environments, SAP HANA, or SAP application servers. Additionally, Qlik Compose for Data Warehouses can be used to easily generate and automate logical data models from SAP directly in BigQuery freeing up more time for data analysts to leverage advanced built-in capabilities such as BigQuery ML to derive greater value and insights using standard SQL without the need for advanced programming expertise.

Delivering faster results with real-time 

Traditional extract-transform-load (ETL) solutions operate on a batch basis, pulling data sets from SAP daily, hourly, or every minute. These tools often require manual mapping of multiple data fields so that data flows accurately. Given SAP’s highly complex table relationships, in which a single transaction can result in multiple changes, this can be a time consuming and tedious process. ETL can also increase the burden on your SAP systems.

Qlik Replicate simplifies this with its intuitive user interface where you can set up real-time data replication between SAP and BigQuery, eliminating the need for manual coding. And, to prevent system overhead, as soon as a new transaction is entered into SAP, the resulting data is replicated into BigQuery in a process known as change data capture (CDC) from SAP’s log layer. This means that data transfer can benefit from high performance with minimal impact on the source system’s resources. Read our latest white paper to learn how to extract SAP data into BigQuery leveraging Qlik Replicate. 

Solution expertise for all core SAP workloads

It doesn’t matter what database your SAP system runs on, Qlik Replicate supports all core SAP systems. It automates real-time data replication and decodes SAP’s complex, application-specific data structures into formats that flow smoothly into BigQuery. This ensures that anyone who depends on data analytics has the most current and relevant SAP data they need. For its robust solution capabilities Qlik has received a new “SAP on Google Cloud Expertise” designation for supporting:

  • Fast onboarding and accelerated replication of SAP data into Google Cloud
  • Real-time and continuous data replication from SAP applications to BigQuery
  • Support for all core SAP modules and a broad set of data sources
  • Automated data integration, which cuts resource requirements for initial delivery and ongoing maintenance

Proven customer results

Many SAP customers have experienced the benefits of leveraging Qlik alongside BigQuery for data analytics and AI at scale, including German luxury department store chain Breuninger. In order to meet its customers’ growing and changing expectations,Breuninger needed to accelerate its time to insight from data sources across a highly dispersed landscape of on-premises databases and systems, including SAP. The company uses Qlik Replicate to feed corporate data from modules in its SAP system into BigQuery and integrate its varying on-premises databases with the Google Cloud environment. This has yielded game-changing, real-time customer insights for the retailer.

What could your business do with faster, more integrated insights? Learn more about BigQuery for SAP customers and also how Qlik and Google Cloud can help you modernize and automate data integration and analytics.

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