Case Study: Market Research

How a market research tech company took its in-app analytics experience to the next level:

Our client delivers interactive analytics to marketing teams through which they can research their competitors’ brand and marketing activities as well as their own. The platform relies on huge volumes of web-traffic data and other sources, which are continuously streamed into S3 and from there serve a variety of use cases and features within the customer-facing analytics platform.

A crucial component of delivering a great user experience for their customers is making sure that users don’t have to wait long to get results for their questions. As users interact with the platform, waiting more than a couple of seconds is considered unacceptable. This forced the company to make many painful tradeoffs:

- Delivering analysis over a month of data (~10TB), and not a quarter (~40TB), because of the decrease in performance when trying to analyze a bigger data set.
- Aggregating data for full-year analysis features to keep performance acceptable, while giving up on the ability to drill into the granular data. 
- Limiting the types of data that can be analyzed, as many semi-structured sources could not be analyzed fast enough compared to structured data. 

With data already stored in S3, Firebolt was able to quickly fill the gaps. After a quick integration through the AWS Marketplace, the company chose the right combination of EC2 clusters and mapped them to the various use cases. Since Firebolt does not charge any markup on AWS resource costs, the company was able to utilize more resources to overcome their challenges and painful tradeoffs. Firebolt was easily placed between the data stream and the customer-facing application, replacing multiple data technologies with one centralized, efficient and elastic engine that could take care of all the analytics workloads.