Wayfair Embraces Self-Service BI - Case Study

“We wanted to move our fast-growing business to the cloud but didn’t want to lose the capabilities we had in our on-premises environment. AtScale helped us do that and was a major part of driving cloud adoption for our data consumers and data producers across our organization.”

-Matthew Hartwig

Associate Director, Data Infrastructure Team at Wayfair

In order to support Wayfair’s fast-growing business, the eCommerce retailer’s data infrastructure team embarked on a path to modernize their analytics infrastructure and move to a cloud platform. With mission-critical analysis taking place in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), Wayfair needed to identify an OLAP alternative that maintained query performance but with a more scalable cloud-friendly solution.

As Wayfair shifted their data infrastructure to Google BigQuery, AtScale provided the semantic layer and dimensional analysis capability that accelerated performance with no need to extract data from the cloud data warehouse.

Challenge

Transitioning to the cloud and enhancing business agility

As a retailer, Wayfair constantly uses its data to measure not just customer interest but to chart the performance of their manufacturers. To operate their business successfully, they need to parse through data to predict the price and quantity of every SKU.

For Wayfair to successfully leverage its data, the retailer first needed to drastically simplify its sprawling analytics infrastructure. Maintaining business continuity through their transition to the cloud necessitated operating a hybrid on-premises/cloud environment for a time.

Wayfair also needed to ensure that the transition didn’t disrupt the hundreds of business analysts who relied on Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) to manage their merchandising operations every day. For a seamless transition, Wayfair’s Data Infrastructure team needed a partner who could support their current business operations while building a better system for the future without losing a beat.

Solution

Applying a semantic layer to simplify and accelerate analytics

To support their modernization, Wayfair chose AtScale to ensure that the company could still support hundreds of business analysts using Microsoft Excel and Tableau and maintain OLAP analytics capability without the overhead and data movement required by SSAS. AtScale bridged Wayfair’s cloud data with business analysts who relied on high-performance dimensional analytics.

Wayfair expects all employees to be able to interact with data and encourages a self-serve analytics culture. The ability to maintain a single source of governed metrics that can be accessed with different BI tools supported this culture.

Results

Better, faster data access for a $10 billion company.

As a result of analytics modernization, Wayfair has been able to accelerate their time-to-insight with a live connection to cloud data at OLAP query speeds.

AtScale supported Wayfair’s data culture by providing one unified and governed view of business data for the hundreds of data modelers and business analysts who support the full range of Wayfair’s online businesses.

With AtScale’s support, Wayfair made the leap to the cloud with minimal disruption while accelerating their efforts to enhance data literacy among their employees and encouraging a self-service analytics culture.