Softwear BV
Vectorwise empowers SaaS provider, Softwear BV, to offer retailers and wholesalers high-speed intuitive analytics
About Softwear BV
While large retail organizations have it all sewn up when it comes to retail analytics and reporting, many of the smaller companies in this sector are only just starting out. But thanks to Softwear BV and its service offering, a provider of SaaS-based solutions for fashion and apparel retailers and wholesalers in the Netherlands, many are ahead of the pack. Founded in 1988, Softwear helps 600 retailers and 120 wholesale companies run their ERP and POS systems as well as benefit from deep-dive analytic reporting to drive their business.
As the only Dutch SaaS vendor in this market, the company is focused on the small to medium-sized market, with many of their customers having one or two shops in their portfolio. Their sweetspot is helping retailers that have fewer than twenty outlets and wholesalers with fewer than one hundred employees.
Since 2002, Softwear’s entire portfolio of products, solutions and services has been ondemand and hosted in the cloud. No data is on any customer’s hardware on their premises; instead it is hosted in Softwear’s data centers. With its audience having no expertise in IT, Softwear offers training and help to get their customers started; in effect, Softwear serves as the IT department for its clients.
Challenge
Given that Softwear has been the sole IT provider for its customer base for some time, many of its customers have looked to the company to offer not only ERP and EPOS but also analytics and reporting on their business. Its client base expects Softwear to deliver this capability and not outsource it to a third-party vendor. For years, Softwear ran its solutions using a custom-built FoxPro application, but poor performance and functionality soon became as issue for the customer base. With database tables growing from millions of records to potentially billions, the company’s transactional-based database solution just could not keep up with the analytic demands from the customers.
Furthermore, Softwear wanted to streamline the applications and amount of hardware that was needed in its data centers to run its offerings. And Softwear wanted to offer the analytic reporting layer as a SaaSbased on-demand online solution. To do this, they had to look for another solution.
Vectorwise – high performance analytics
Having heard about Actian Vectorwise through the X100 project at the national research center for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands, Jeroen de Vries, CEO of Softwear, became very interested in the analytic database. As a Windows-centric organization, they waited for the release of Vectorwise for Windows and set about testing the solution. Softwear was interested in the price/performance ratio and in comparing it to its incumbent home-grown transactionalbased database.
Following an extensive period of testing, it became clear how different Vectorwise was in terms of increased query and analytic speeds and how both Softwear and its customer base could manipulate analytic reporting data. Once they had set up a process to bulk copy historical data from the company’s source systems into Vectorwise, they ran tests that showed how their legacy system first took 20 seconds to write a query and then 80 seconds to execute it – for data on one company with one outlet. And yet Vectorwise allowed the company to see all their customers’ data in just one database table and slice and dice the data in just milliseconds. Furthermore, with plans to grow their Vectorwise database to 10 billion line items, Softwear continues to test the database for scalabilty and sees no degradation in performance as it grows in size.
"Our customers are not data analytics experts, they are retailers,” explains Jeroen de Vries, CEO at Softwear. “We take care of the database and reporting, so that they can focus on their business but still get access to the information they need. With our customers wanting more and more access via tablets and smart devices, by using Vectorwise and a home-grown front-end interface, we can offer them a unique user experience that allows them to drill down into their business easily, conveniently and at speeds that were unimaginable before Vectorwise. Indeed, Vectorwise has accelerated the analytic and reporting service by a factor of 100X.”
Having developed an intuitive BI front-end themselves, Softwear’s customer base can manipulate their data and reports interactively, and given that it is offered via a SaaS solution, they can log on from anywhere and see their data and results including the ability to report and chart them with a few simple clicks of the finger or mouse.
“One of the things many of our customers want is the ability to consolidate results and compare and contrast them against their competitors’ or the national average for a given product or article,” continues Jeroen. “Here Vectorwise really excels; in fact we are now able to offer our customer base a much richer service in that they can access a whole variety of information including their performance versus the national average, or the performance of certain brands in certain outlets versus sales across other retail outlets. In that sense, Vectorwise delivers analytic capability that allows us to break down the confines of reporting. No longer do we just offer one standard report that does not give much insight, we now deliver value by allowing the retailer and wholesaler to guage their business versus a wide variety of other factors. In fact it is the customer that drives the innovation – they want market information, they want to know what their competitors are doing. The more that they want, the more we can deliver thanks to Vectorwise.”
Softwear delivers its solutions written in HTML5 with Vectorwise powering the analytics and BI, MongoDB for property store, and development takes place using Python. With its customers expecting the service more and more on mobile devices, Softwear is developing app-based solutions so that data can be viewed and analyzed by its customers when they are on the move.
“Our customers expect the best, so we needed to ensure we have best-of-breed solutions to respond accordingly. Vectorwise is the best-of-breed solution for analytics and reporting,” continues Jeroen. “Furthermore, our solutions need to be dynamic, easy to use and affordable. Given Vectorwise’s affordable model, we can continue to deliver on that promise.”
Ongoing use of Vectorwise shows how Vectorwise takes just milli-seconds to access and analyze their customers’ data and how granular in detail their customers can get with their analytic questions. One example cited is a well-used and requested report on consolidated supplier information including brand and products sold. Where Softwear’s legacy solution struggled to satisfy the query in five minutes or less, Vectorwise has changed the dynamics of the game for good by bringing timescales down to the milli-second level.
“With Vectorwise, you get to the interactive state within a blink of the eye and you can analyze and interact with your data much more dynamically. Previously, many of our customers did not get to analyze dynamically their information, they just had one report which was a pain. Now they do. And on their iPads and iPhones – which is what they want and what they expect.”
Softwear also sees value in the small footprint of Vectorwise. Before, the company was running 100s of servers with legacy database software for analytics, now the analytics are all done with Vectorwise on a single server with multiple cores.
“Our plan was to do things smarter,” continues Jeroen. “We sought to consolidate all our customer data into one database and also offer speed and performance by way of better management reporting and analytics by the customers. From a maintenance perspective, it is so much easier to run Vectorwise as opposed to our previous solution for analytics.”
Softwear also appreciates the architechture of Vectorwise and the non-reliance on indexes to make the database perform. “I know a lot about databases and what makes them run, and every database needs some sort of maintenance to make them perform, except for Vectorwise,” continues Jeroen. “I also know that maintaining indexes on a 10 billion row table would be a nightmare, so if I don’t have to do it, then all the better. Plus, it’s great that Vectorwise leverages the power of modern architectures and has not fallen into the trap of other databases on the market that are essentially 30-40 years old in the way they are set up to operate. It’s exciting to use a smart solution like Vectorwise that gets its performance from the chiplevel – I ask myself why no one has thought of it before.”
Softwear’s business has now been spearheaded through the use of Vectorwise; the speed of the analytic database means that they can offer their customers more services and be more fleet-of-foot with their offerings. “We have never had the budget for 6-figure sum database solutions that promise performance,” concluded Jeroen. “But even if we had, we would never have tried because of the sheer amount of hardware, complex setup and consultancy that would have been involved. With Vectorwise, it is extremely refreshing to use an analytic database engine that offers the price and performance ratio that fits my business and that of my customers.”