Attaining a 360-Degree View of the Customer

In response to market disruptions brought on by Covid-19, a mid-size enterprise software vendor needed to optimize sales and marketing go-to-market (GTM) operations. The company had made major investments in solutions from Salesforce, Marketo, and many other vendors—all with the intent of gaining greater actionable insights into customer needs and behaviors—but sales and marketing strategists still lacked the full 360-degree view of the customer that they sought.

C360 Data Aggregation and Analytics

Actian Data Platform integration, management, and analytics platform provided a powerful yet cost-effective means of rapidly aggregating data from all the systems containing critical customer information—including Salesforce CRM and the other marketing, sales automation, and transactional tools in use within the company. Actian also provides powerful customer 360 analytics capabilities that make it easy for non-IT users to run sophisticated analytics and visualization tools—in real time—to gain insights from the aggregated data.

Improved Customer Engagement and Sales

With Actian, the company saw significant improvements at every stage of the customer journey. Real-time aggregation and analysis of data from multiple systems—including Salesforce CRM—led to more effective micro segmentation and persona targeting, lead qualification, faster conversion from MQL to opportunities, and shorter sales cycles. The company even recouped the entire cost of its Actian Data Platform deployment in the first week by moving historical data from expensive Salesforce storage to low-cost Actian storage.

The Challenge

In a market crowded with big names such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle, the sales and marketing teams at a mid-sized company without high brand recognition had their jobs cut out for them. To succeed, they needed to make every customer interaction count—to deliver an “ideal” customer experience, regardless of whether the customer was well known and long established or an entirely new prospect.

But how to do that? The company had invested in top-tier solutions, including Salesforce CRM and a variety of marketing and sales apps designed for 1-click integration with Salesforce. Despite these efforts, the view of the customer within Salesforce was hardly the 360-degree view sales and marketing were expecting. Not only did the individual apps feeding into Salesforce CRM appear to be providing only fragments of the total picture they were supposed to present, but the Salesforce CRM solution itself seemed unable to present even these fragmented pictures as quickly as the company’s fast-moving go-to-market initiatives demanded. The full, 360-degree customer view, accessible in real time, continued to elude the company.

By the end of March 2020, these problems came to a head. The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic had disrupted the dynamics of commerce like nothing in recent history. Uncertain economic conditions threatened to affect both the company and its customers, and the company needed to be able to respond more quickly and appropriately to customer needs and opportunities. Company executives realized that though Salesforce and the other apps contained a great deal of valuable customer information, the company’s marketing and sales teams needed a unified, 360-degree view of the customer that Salesforce and the other applications simply could not provide in anything close to real time. They needed a way to quickly and easily aggregate critical customer data from all their systems—including Salesforce CRM—in a single repository where they could quickly run analysis and visualizations to gain the real-time insights they sought—preferably without a need to engage IT to code ETL solutions to deliver these insights.

The Solution

With the realization that insights demanded more than they could extract quickly from their existing infrastructure, company executives established three new objectives:

1. Know the customer better. To achieve this goal, the company had to find a way to enable key business groups to work more directly with the data informing the 360-degree picture of each customer. These teams didn’t have time to work with, then wait for, IT to work with Salesforce CRM. They needed a simpler way to interact with and model customer data in an iterative fashion.
2. Drive better results programmatically. To achieve this, sales and marketing teams needed rapid access to insights that could be transformed instantly into actionable insights that drive better initiatives and improved marketing campaigns and sales motions.
3. Start a Customer360 initiative to make all relevant data—including customer data from Salesforce CRM—available in a single unified repository separate from the CRM system. To achieve this, and to achieve it cost-effectively, they would need a low cost, high performance connected cloud offering.

All of which they found in the Actian Data Platform. Indeed, for this company, Actian provides exactly the high-performance, low-cost Customer 360 solution required to drive customer engagement:

• Through DataConnect, Actian Data Platform can use SFDC to perform real-time analysis on Salesforce CRM data.
• Through use of multiple real-time DataConnect integrations, the company can quickly bring together data from all useful datasets—static and streaming, on-prem or in the cloud—and from that gain new actionable insights.
• The company’s users can work with the Business Intelligence and visualization tools of their choosing to model customer personas and draw the critical insights that can inform the ideal customer experiences they seek to create.

Actian Data Platform is offered as a managed service available through AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. It can also be deployed on-premises, in multi-cloud configurations, or even in a hybrid configuration that spans all these options.

All these factors made it easy for the company to deploy Actian quickly and begin to aggregate customer data using self-service data integration tools on day one. The DataConnect feature of the Actian Data Platform automates data preparation and ingestion, enabling even non-coders to quickly load data from popular applications and data repositories, including Salesforce, Marketo, and hundreds of others. Users can even easily load structured and semi-structured JSON data, including event-based and streaming data, without having to depend on IT for support.

The Benefits

Literally within minutes of deploying the Actian solution, the company was gaining insights into how it could optimize operations and improve its engagements with customers. They built widgets to monitor and manage outreach conversion, prospect engagement, sales pipeline analytics, and the prospect’s journey—and they did so effectively by gaining the comprehensive real-time view of their customers that they had been seeking. While in this instance users at the company employed Microsoft Power BI to visualize the results arising from Actian queries, users can, in fact, use any number of popular BI tools, including Looker, Tableau, MicroStrategy, and Qlik.

With Actian Data Platform providing a way to aggregate and analyze data outside of Salesforce CRM, the company gained insights that could then be used to refine and tune the Salesforce CRM system that front-line sales and marketing teams use on a daily basis. With Actian Data Platform running diagnostics and reports from outside the CRM system, the company was able to identify the operational go-to-market enhancements they needed to make.

“It is so important to be able to perform digital optimizations early, often, and with high efficiency,” says a senior director at the company, “and you can’t do that from inside the CRM system. When you’re looking at these optimizations from a strategic revenue and marketing operations level, you need an outside view, and the Actian Data Platform provides that. Once you have a path to making the operation cleaner and a way to sustain it, the revenue and marketing operations teams have all the tools to become leaders in digital and sales automation.”

Driving Better Customer Experiences

Actian Data Platform has enabled the company to become much more agile and data-driven by enriching its ability to gain real-time insights from unified but dynamic datasets. Users can run a single report that, because it analyzes data from multiple sources simultaneously, provides a better understanding of an effort’s effectiveness. The insights are more accurate, are delivered in milliseconds, and enable decision-makers at all levels of the company to understand how well the efforts are working. Even when those reports expose problems, there are benefits. Before Actian Data Platform enabled these deeper insights, problems could be masked through reliance on canned reporting from the CRM system, or ever-changing reporting on other systems, that failed to present a complete and accurate picture.

“At a sales representative level, our widgets, powered by Actian Data Platform, help us to see the unified account, lead, contact history, and stage within the customer journey in a single view,” says the senior director. “For us this is a game-changer because of how quickly our prospects and customers move. Being able to roll up a better demand signal at the entire account level is incredibly valuable because it enables us to respond quickly in a targeted and tailored manner, and that was something we just could not do with Salesforce alone.”

Reducing Costs During Uncertain Times

Other benefits arising from reliance on Actian Data Platform include opportunities to reduce operating costs. By deploying Actian Data Platform in the cloud, the company saved nearly $100K in the first few days—simply by offloading historical data stored in Salesforce to Actian Data Platform. The company was paying a premium to store its old data in Salesforce and immediately reduced its costs by moving that data to storage attached to Actian Data Platform.

The company also avoided more than $1 Million in other software app/platform costs and consulting fees, which it had anticipated incurring before it opted to use Actian Data Platform. That was the expected cost to “clean up” the company’s SFDC implementation (which had been intended to facilitate the rapid, cost-effective integration of third-party data into Salesforce CRM). With DataConnect, SFDC and other connectors and APIs can all be managed by the company’s own business analysts, who understand the business and who just needed the right set of tools to unify the key data sets and begin deriving insights quickly and cost-effectively.

Onwards Toward Digital Transformation

For the company, the next chapter is all about further digital transformation. Actian Data Platform has helped it evolve its business processes and infrastructure to achieve more—and better—customer wins. The company’s strategic teams use the insights from Actian Data Platform to continuously push value towards both the customers and the company’s senior executives.

“Actian Data Platform really transformed our sales and marketing engine,” says the senior director, “and did it all while working within our existing infrastructure. Deployment was so fast and easy, with minimal upfront investment. We didn’t have to rip and replace anything. In fact, it just made our existing setup smarter.”

Some people involved in the building trades—carpenters and bricklayers, for example—excel at building and maintaining structures. Others—such as plumbers, electricians, and HVAC installers—excel at building and maintaining infrastructures. One thing they seem to have in common is that few have any interest in building or maintaining a database—even when that database lies at the heart of an ERP system specifically designed to meet the needs of firms operating in the building trades.

For Hannover-based TAIFUN Software, that presented a challenge. There were several small-footprint databases its developers could have chosen to use in their trades-optimized ERP system that were capable of providing a touch-free experience—but they typically sacrificed performance to enable ease of use. Others could provide the high performance TAIFUN wanted to deliver, but at the cost of ease of use. To ensure ongoing optimal performance, a customer would need access to an IT team or at least a skilled database manager. Most of the companies TAIFUN was targeting had neither.

But TAIFUN did find exactly the solution its ERP system needed—a high performance, small-footprint system that users never have to touch—in the database now known as Actian Zen.

The Solution

TAIFUN’s use of Actian Zen actually predates the existence of Actian Zen. TAIFUN began using Zen’s predecessor, Btrieve, back in the late 1980s. Btrieve provided the power and small footprint TAIFUN needed even then to drive its fledgling ERP system. This early incarnation of the TAIFUN ERP solution ran on Windows-based PCs and was ideal for firms at all levels of the building trade industry. It enabled even the smallest company to gain the power of an integrated, multi-user ERP solution, and because it was optimized for the building trades, it provided the core functionality every firm needed.

Over time, TAIFUN continued to rely on the power of the Btrieve database to facilitate high-performance execution as it added even more functionality and services to its ERP system. The Btrieve database itself came to be known as the Pervasive database, and it remained fixed in the center of TAIFUN’s ERP system—even as TAIFUN’s ERP system evolved to run both on a small PC and in a more distributed client-server configuration that attracted larger customers in the German and Austrian building trade and crafts industries.

TAIFUN’s reliance upon this powerful database did not go unexamined over time. Dedicated to meeting the needs of its customers, TAIFUN continued to look at the field of database products—and continued to be convinced that it had made the right choice all along.

“We did look at other databases,” says Steffen Goldenstein, Head of Development at TAIFUN, “but we still use the Btrieve access layer, even today when running Actian Zen. We don’t use SQL or the relational side of Zen, so if we compare what we’re using to any of the relational databases that are out there today, there’s no comparison. Actian Zen is extremely fast, and that’s what we need. A relational database just can’t perform in this way.”

Pervasive eventually evolved into today’s Actian Zen, and TAIFUN’s ERP system has evolved alongside it. Today, TAIFUN’s ERP system offers modules for everything from job costing and accounting to materials management, time tracking, document management and archiving, email, and much more. The system interacts with mobile- and tablet-enabled ERP applications too which enable users on a job site to process orders, capture customer signatures, check inventory, and more throughout the course of their workday. All data sent from the field is remotely passed to the Actian Zen database.

The Benefits

For TAIFUN, power, performance, and stability for the customer remain the forces driving its reliance on Actian Zen.

“TAIFUN’s ERP system is extremely fast, which is great when you’re using small computers,” says Mr. Goldenstein. “A big part of that is due to the Actian Zen database. It’s easy to install; it’s predictable, reliable, and very responsive. The biggest thing for us was database stability. Our customers are not IT guys; they don’t want to deal with database issues. We install it; they use it. They don’t need to manage it. That’s a big part of what our customers like about our software.”

“Everyone involved in the building trades and specialty crafts in Germany uses a specialty ERP system,” Mr. Goldenstein continues. “They need to, because there are components built into the system that won’t be there in a more generic ERP system. Everyone in Germany and Austria works directly with wholesalers, so the ERP software needs to integrate with those wholesalers. Many of our customers are small firms running their operations on a single computer. Others have client-server implementations that support hundreds of users. We’ve never had any problem with Actian Zen or its predecessors. It’s always stable and it’s always reliable. That’s a huge benefit for us.”

The Actian Zen database storage location and footprint flexibility also adds compelling value for TAIFUN’s customers. “Our customers are very sensitive to issues of data privacy and control,” says Mr. Goldenstein, “so it’s important to them that they be able to determine where the data resides. They’re not necessarily excited about storing data in the cloud, and Actian Zen makes it easy to keep the data wherever they want. The data sets don’t require a lot of storage space.”

Ultimately, all the benefits attributable to Actian Zen accrue in obscurity. Few of TAIFUN’s customers have any idea that they’re using Actian Zen. The company makes no attempt to hide this fact, but the database is effectively embedded in the TAIFUN ERP system, and that’s what customers see. The small size of the data set? That appears to be a feature of TAIFUN ERP. The recently-enhanced database encryption features? That too appears to be just another benefit delivered by TAIFUN ERP.

“We make no attempt to hide the fact that there’s an Actian database at the heart of our ERP solution,” says Mr. Goldenstein, “but neither do we draw attention to it. The database is in the background of our ERP system. It’s there, and it does its job without drawing attention to itself. Many of our customers may not even know there’s a database involved.” And that’s just the way it should be. In the end, Actian Zen is designed to operate without drawing attention to itself. It performs without incident. It runs without crashing. It streaks along without the ongoing ministrations of a database administrator. In short, it empowers TAIFUN’s ERP solution to do exactly what it is designed to do: deliver excellent operational support to the people building the structures—and infrastructures—of 21st century Europe.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming manufacturing in ways not seen since the emergence of automation on the shop floor itself. Indeed, the transformation enabled by the ability to monitor and manage equipment remotely is itself being transformed by the emergence of intelligent technologies that can do far more than older PLC-based technologies could ever do—and at a fraction of the cost. The control and monitoring features of a PLC device costing $2,000 just a few years ago can now be delivered by an IoT-enabled device costing less than $50.

That transformation poses opportunities for a firm like Global Shop Solutions, which has been providing a very popular ERP solution to customers in the manufacturing world for more than 40 years. To accommodate the demand for inexpensive IoT-enabled sensors and shop floor controllers, Global Shop Solutions needed a serverless database that it could embed within these inexpensive devices to store and process information. While a tool such as SQLite could meet the need for a small-footprint serverless database capable of collecting data, sharing the data in SQLite with any server-based database—including the Actian Zen database upon which the Global Shop Solutions ERP system has always relied—would require a middleware layer to transform the SQLite data into a format that another database could ingest.

When Global Shop Solutions officials got a glimpse of Actian Zen Mobile, though, a serverless version of the same Actian Zen database that supports the Global Shop Solutions ERP system, they could see precisely the embedded solution they needed to meet evolving customer demands.

A History of Transactional Excellence

Global Shop Solutions is no stranger to Actian Zen. The company has been using the database since the mid-2000s, when it was known as Pervasive SQL. The Global Shop Solutions ERP modules gained the ability to interact efficiently with the database through the high performance Btrieve API, while users gained richer, more flexible ways of analyzing and reporting on the data in the ERP system using standard SQL queries. Now known as Actian Zen, this high-performance database that offers both transactional and relational access has continued to beat at the heart of the Global Shop Solutions ERP system ever since.

“For Global Shop Solutions, having relational access as well as direct transactional access into other application components through ODBC and ADO.net was important,” says Chris Okamuro, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Global Shop Solutions. “We could rely in a single database platform to provide the full range of functionality that customers demanded.”

A High-Performance Resource for ERP

As it was then, so it is now. With customers looking to extend their manufacturing infrastructures using inexpensive IoT devices, Global Shop Solutions needed a way forward. And, again, Actian Zen showed the way.

Because Actian Zen Mobile uses the same security models, data types, and data formats as the server-based edition of Actian Zen already supporting the Global Shop Solutions ERP system, moving data securely between an IoT device and the Global Shop Solutions ERP system requires no ETL and no middleware. Not only does that eliminate the need for Global Shop Solutions to create and manage an entire infrastructure layer, but it eliminates what could become a processing bottleneck in a customer’s manufacturing environment. No matter how efficiently a middleware layer can perform those ETL operations when transforming data from one database format to another, those operations impose a quantifiable processing overhead. Depending on the volume of data moving through a manufacturer’s IoT environment—and that volume appears only to be increasing—the potential for a bottleneck at the point of ETL increases in lockstep, which in turn increases the likelihood that the performance of an ERP system relying on such ETL processes will eventually be compromised.

For an ERP provider like Global Shop Solutions, whose customers range in size from $10m to $1B  in revenue, such complications need to be avoided. Some Global Shop Solutions customers have understaffed IT teams, so Global Shop Solutions needed a platform whose performance did not require the ongoing attention of a DBA—which, again, made Actian Zen an ideal solution.

“One of the things that’s helped us for years is the light-weight management aspect of Actian Zen,” says Okamuro. “Particularly for our smaller customers, that has always been an attractive feature of our ERP solution. They really need a no on-site management database.”

Delivering Ongoing Benefits

Going forward, the opportunities enabled by the power and flexibility of Actian Zen are manifold for Global Shop Solutions. A Raspberry Pi device or embedded sensor can run Actian Zen Mobile for local data capture and processing. It could pass extracts or even whole data sets up to a local edge server running Actian Zen Edge edition—or on to a centralized system in a datacenter or the cloud running Actian Zen Enterprise or Actian Zen Cloud edition, At any level, Actian Zen provides powerful services for high performance transaction processing and analytics, ensuring Global Shop Solutions customers with an open path for evolving their operations and gaining deeper insights.

“We’re now looking at new ways that customers can generate value from the data they can collect,” says Okamuro. “We’re using OpenML and Tensor to interact with the data in Actian Zen to develop new insights and find new ways to make people’s jobs easier. With all the data that we can capture in Actian Zen, that could lead to ML training sets that enable firms to deliver greater value, higher quality, even more realistic forecasts, which is very important to our customers.”

The oil and gas business has a soft spot for the wildcatter, the person who goes out on their own and succeeds in the boom and bust world of energy. It also has a long history of larger companies scooping up smaller companies, particularly those that have proven themselves successful and want to cash in on that success.

Houston-based Superior Energy Services, which serves the drilling, completion, and production-related needs of oil and gas companies around the world, was particularly good at scooping up those smaller companies—and, in doing so, had built out a global business with a portfolio of services that covers everything from tools and equipment to highly-trained personnel who can simply show up at a designated site and get right to work.

Behind this single-company veneer, however, lay a more complicated reality. Superior had acquired hundreds of smaller firms but had not imposed on those firms any ham-fisted mandates about what kinds of systems they should use when conducting business. “At one point, we had well over 100 different product and service lines that basically operated autonomously,” says John Streeter, Director of Credit and Collections at Superior Energy Services. “Within these different product and service lines, multiple ERP systems existed—and multiple versions within those ERP systems.”

The problem for Superior was not simply that the company needed to maintain quite a number of unique ERP systems. There was a customer-facing downside as well: Many of Superior’s product and service lines were dealing with the same customers. Individual units within Superior were invoicing the same customers independently, which was both inefficient and time-consuming for the individual groups. This fragmented approach also had the effect of increasing the overall number of days that it took for Superior to collect payment for its services. The days sales outstanding (DSO) key performance indicator (KPI) was, on the whole, nowhere near as superior as Superior executives wanted.

“We wanted to identify some of our larger customers with higher volumes and integrate our billing and invoicing cycle with their payables and procurement groups to create greater operational efficiencies,” says Streeter. “The C-suite wanted us to reduce DSO to the shortest time possible, as DSO affects cash flows and our working capital.”

The question for Streeter was clear: How to accomplish this in the face of such a decentralized IT infrastructure?

The Solution

Superior wasn’t going to centralize individual back offices. It wasn’t even going to mandate any specific approach. Instead, Streeter came up with an approach that encouraged the different back offices to standardize certain procurement and invoicing processes. This approach offered two key benefits that would be felt both by the individuals within the business units and the executives in the C-Suite: It would reduce the amount of time required to prepare and submit an invoice, reduce DSO, and improve the company’s cash posture. Key to the success of this approach was the adaption of the Actian Business Xchange (BX) platform.

The Actian BX platform offers a fully managed, cloud-based data exchange service for both buyers and suppliers. Actian BX empowers different groups within Superior to exchange and translate invoices, purchase orders, shipping notices, and other documents with its customers without regard for specific document formats or requirements. A business unit within Superior can send an invoice to Actian BX, which validates, converts, and delivers that invoice in a format that is compatible with the customer’s invoicing system. The B2B integration service available through Actian BX is flexible enough to support any ERP system in use within Superior—as well as flexible and powerful enough to support any ERP system a customer is using to ingest and process invoices. Actian itself provides an onboarding service that quickly sets up new organizations within Superior as well as any customers that agree to receive Superior invoices through Actian BX.

The Benefits

As noted, the benefits that Streeter’s approach offered were twofold. By standardizing their invoicing processes and using Actian BX to submit their invoices, the business units within Superior could save time and money. As those business units began to use Actian BX, they started to realize just how much time and money they could save, too.

“The folks actually doing the billing and invoicing have a lot more time,” says Streeter. “They can save between 7 and 12 days of labor per month by using this process versus continuing with their old process. That is a huge benefit.”

Indeed, Streeter found that the time savings produced a groundswell of enthusiasm within Superior. “When we first started,” he says, “most of the business units began putting up walls and showing some resistance. So, we knew we had to handle each business unit individually and get the message out to them the right way. It took a while, but when the business groups started seeing the results, people started jumping on the bandwagon and actually helped promote the venture for us. This was great, as a lot of these divisions talk to each other. We were not having to sell this approach anymore; people started coming and asking to get onboard. You’d have somebody call up who was one of the biggest resisters in the beginning—and now they were asking to be put at the front of the line.”

The executives in the C-suite who had asked Streeter to reduce DSO and improve the company’s cash position were just as excited by the results of Streeter’s efforts. “Superior saw a tremendous increase and improvement in working capital,” says Streeter, “and in our business and industry, cash is everything. Over a period of four years, DSO came down roughly 18-19%. This put us in the position of having a healthy cash balance when the next oil and gas downturn hit and commodity prices slumped. We were definitely in at least as good, if not a better position than our competitors when that happened due in part to the gains in DSO from our integration project. I think that speaks volumes about the success of the project.”

If a medication could work in seconds rather than days, most health care consumers and practitioners would see that as a win. Indeed, the longer it takes for a medication to have an effect, the longer the discomfort and suffering of the person whose wellbeing has been compromised. Reducing the time to results is an ongoing goal throughout the medical field.

It turns out that what is true for medication is also true for biomedical researchers pursuing better treatments. The faster data and information can be gathered and analyzed, the faster new discoveries that have the potential to change the quality of people’s lives can be made. But biomedical researchers at the Clinical Trial Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit (CTSU) in the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford were feeling much like those long-suffering patients who had to wait for their medications to kick in. Researchers at CTSU deal with huge volumes of information pertaining to the causes and treatments of chronic illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, and stroke, which collectively account for most adult deaths in the developed world, in search of greater insights into links between causes and diseases as well as prevention and treatment options. But gleaning insights from the ever-increasing volume of data was becoming more and more difficult; the researchers were simply running up against the limits of an aging legacy database infrastructure. Their ad hoc analytical queries could be complicated, to be sure, but the wait for a response could stretch into multiple days of waiting.

CTSU researchers needed a faster, more cost-effective way to identify, manipulate, and extract the exact data they needed from the great pool of data they had accumulated, and gain insights from that data far faster than the legacy infrastructure could accommodate. The solution? The Actian Ingres hybrid database for next-generation operational analytics.

Solution

The Actian Ingres enterprise-grade hybrid database for next-generation operational analytics combines the industry-leading Actian Ingres transactional database with the Actian Vector analytic database to enable record-breaking analytics on large volumes of data. Actian Ingres also bundles world-class integration and enterprise monitoring features as well as greater ease of administration than competitive products, all of which enable CTSU IT personnel to support the solution, even with the large volumes of data involved, with minimal engagement.

“We need IT solutions that can support our research and data requirements over long periods of time,” says Martin Bowes, a database administrator at CTSU. “Some studies can last five, ten, even thirty years and involve vast numbers of people. In the case of the Biobank project, more than 500,000 people had volunteered information about themselves, and we knew that managing and analyzing that volume of data was going to be a problem.”

CTSU had been using Actian Ingres to support other operations within the University for years, so Bowes was already familiar with Actian. When he attended a data conference and saw a first-hand demonstration of the high-speed vector processing analytic capabilities in Actian Ingres, a lightbulb lit up. “Actian Ingres represents an evolutionary concept, which I like. There is no steep learning curve involved with the database, there is no magic that has to be learned, and you don’t need lots of hardware to benefit from its performance. Actian Ingres would enable us to improve our analytics capabilities enormously and deliver a much stronger service to our user that would enable them to extend the scope of their research dramatically.”

Benefits

As soon as Actian Ingres was in place, CTSU researchers loaded their data—and were analyzing it within hours.

“The first thing we noticed was the speed at which you could do aggregations, pivot the data the way it needed to be, and sum the columns,” says Bowes. “With Actian Ingres we could do all that within a few minutes. It was simply astounding to see such an improvement in agility and performance. The turnaround for analytical queries is simply amazing. Instead of taking days to satisfy a user’s very complex queries, Actian Ingres returns results in just minutes. Information can get out to users who need it to run their discovery projects very quickly.”

Nor is Bowes alone in feeling a sense of wonder about the difference Actian Ingres has enabled at CTSU. “The performance of Actian Ingres makes it possible to run queries that were previously impossible,” says Geraint Jones, another database administrator at CTSU. “We’ve gone from being used to seeing queries hang or take an age to run, to complete disbelief in seeing just how fast Actian Ingres handles them and returns results. Simply jaw-dropping.”

Not surprisingly, as CTSU researchers grew more accustomed to the rapid turnaround times, they grew more demanding. “People have come to expect fast response times,” notes Bowes, “but Actian Ingres enables us to deliver.” Moreover, because Actian Ingres is designed to run on commodity hardware that can scale at a cost-efficient rate, Bowes expects that the Actian solution will have no trouble continuing to support CTSU for the foreseeable future. “We know we will continue to meet our users’ needs with Actian Ingres. As computing moves on and as hardware performance increases, the more benefit our users will see. It is fair to say that we are future-proofed with Actian Ingres.”

Supporting Transaction-Based Processing with Actian Ingres

Prior to deploying Actian Ingres, CTSU had been using Actian Ingres for its day-to-day transactional processing needs. Because Actian Ingres combines the functionality of the Actian Ingres and Actian Vector technologies, CTSU can now use Actian Ingres to support both its analytical and transaction processing requirements. From the perspective of systems administration and management, the addition of the vector processing capabilities of Actian Ingres to existing routines for managing transaction processing technologies of Actian Ingres required minimal training and added very little management overhead. Training and support for Actian Ingres at CTSU continues to be delivered by Actian.

“Actian Ingres not only contains good technologies, it’s also backed up by world-class support as well as a great QA department,” says Jones. “The support that Actian provides CTSU from a maintenance perspective has been phenomenal, and as we see new features and functionality come into the products, Actian’s support teams are ready to solve potential problems before we get there.”

Preparing for the Next Great Breakthrough

In a world where researchers are looking for the next big discovery, CTSU is safeguarded for the future with Actian Ingres. Not only can the organization meet the demands of its users today, it will continue to do so in the future. “Actian Ingres is fast, and it works,” says Bowes. “The analytic database does what it promises to do. If you were to ask me what the advantages are if folks can access and analyze information faster, I would have to say that with Actian Ingres, the opportunities are endless. In fact, it’s great to know that Actian Ingres will help our users get that great epiphany moment when the next big medical discovery is made.”

Among all the pithy sayings for which the Irish are well known, there’s no record of anyone ever saying “Sorry, we can’t accept your tax payments today—the system is down.”

There’s a good reason for that. The Republic of Ireland’s Office of the Revenue Commissioners (Revenue) recognized as far back as 1993 that the agency was going to need a highly available and highly reliable database platform to support uninterrupted operation of its mission-critical computer systems. Revenue adopted the Actian Ingres database and associated application development toolset following a competitive public tendering exercise. The solution has proven its reliability, performance, and resilience over and over. What is a surprise to some, though, is that Revenue is still running its primary back-office and public-facing systems on the Actian Ingres platform. It’s not the same release of Ingres that was installed back in 1993. On the contrary, Revenue has continued to embrace new versions of the core database software, ensuring that it can take advantage of new features while building on the stable, manageable, and economical database platform it has come to trust.

The Solution

The Actian Ingres database platform supports Revenue’s primary back-office and public-facing systems—its Integrated Taxation Services and Revenue Online Services, respectively. It also supports Revenue’s case tracking and contact management systems, its data warehouse, and a variety of third-party systems developed for the Customs and Excise divisions. Through periods of sustained growth (the Celtic Tiger years) as well as periods of global economic contraction, the elasticity and flexibility of Actian Ingres has enabled these applications to scale easily and deliver peak performance in support of Revenue’s operational strategies.

Today, Revenue runs Actian Ingres in multiple installations, each with numerous databases supporting mission-critical applications in both production and development. Revenue’s IT architecture and networks have evolved extensively since 1993—embracing the Java standard, for example, and building out a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to facilitate service delivery—and with each evolutionary step, Actian Ingres has continued to support the agency without interruption. Revenue also makes great use of Actian Vector as part of its BI suite. The speed and capability of Actian Vector provide Revenue with a high-performance analysis of large data volumes.

“We simply cannot afford to be off the air,” says John Barron, Revenue’s CIO, “and Actian Ingres and Vector help ensure that we’re not.”

The Benefits

Revenue’s continued investment in Actian Ingres has enabled the agency to leverage improvements in performance and efficiency. Critical applications that interact with the database can scale even more efficiently, with remote community instances of the database feeding information into a central consolidated database running on Actian Ingres Enterprise edition.

“Actian Ingres and Vector provide us with real-time analytics and operational improvements that have helped us increase revenue collection while reducing internal costs,” says Barron. “We have every reason to anticipate that these kinds of efficiencies will increase over time.”

And time is on Revenue’s side. Its users and support personnel have had years to become familiar with Actian’s ability to evolve and expand without interruption. As a large percentage of Revenue’s customer base moves to mandatory e-filing and e-paying, that familiarity instills confidence that Actian can handle the influx of information and transactions. Already, 75% of Income and Corporation Tax transactions take place online, as do nearly 100% of Customs transactions.

Revenue’s investment in Actian Ingres may yield other dividends, too. The authority’s business model calls for greater inter-application integration and increased use of business intelligence and analytics. New Actian technologies, such as the Actian Data Platform/Vector On-prem hybrid analytical database, may provide the authority with easy-to-embrace opportunities to create whole new kinds of services and insights that can help it meet the needs of its stakeholders more effectively and efficiently.

Actian products have long helped ensure that Revenue could fulfill its fiduciary duties properly and cost-effectively. Even as the world evolves and new challenges and opportunities present themselves, Revenue has learned that it can bank on Actian to keep critical applications running at peak performance.

No two insurance companies are exactly alike, and perhaps that accounts for the challenge facing Hannover Reassurance Company of America (Hannover Re) when onboarding new customers. Hannover Re’s customers sought reinsurance products to cover their own risks in the areas of property, casualty, life, and health insurance. They provided Hannover Re with requisite information about their policies in force, claims, reserves, transactions, and more using a wide range of file types and formats—from Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with multiple tabs to CSV and TXT files, even ACCDB database files.

Ingesting all this information and transferring the salient details into the Life Reinsurance module of Hannover Re’s SAP system was posing ever-greater challenges. Hannover Re’s existing custom-coded onboarding system was unable to keep pace with the variety and volume of information. That inability slowed data ingestion and transformation, which subsequently delayed downstream analysis by other teams at Hannover Re.

While Hannover Re officials understood that this was, technically, a data integration and data management challenge, they also understood that ultimately they needed to solve a business challenge: They needed not just a better way to bring information into Hannover Life Re, they needed a way to enable teams to access and use that information without intervention by the IT department.

The Solution

Hannover Re found the solution to both challenges in Actian DataConnect. Actian DataConnect is an integration solution that enables an organization to quickly and easily design, deploy, and manage integrations on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments—with no limits on data types or volumes. With its emphasis on reuse and adaptability, DataConnect is engineered to help an organization cost-effectively integrate diverse data and applications from numerous endpoints.

Working with Actian, Hannover Re used Actian DataConnect to create an automated workflow that integrates all the steps required to ingest and transform new customer data files so that they can be loaded into Hannover Re’s SAP system, from which it can be accessed and used by different Hannover Re teams. Actian DataConnect facilitates everything from source file ingestion and routing to data and metadata analysis, field mapping, transformation, loading into SAP, and notification of the completed process. Any source file can be processed automatically upon being loaded into a designated repository. Source files can also be processed on demand by any user in the system—without having to engage the IT department.

The Benefits

The process improvements enabled by Actian DataConnect at Hannover Re could be seen immediately by personnel throughout the company. The time required to onboard a new client dramatically decreased, as did the amount of manual intervention that onboarding had previously required. Actian DataConnect relies on validation rules to ensure data quality and tracks task execution in a database that ensures process visibility. If any step in the onboarding process fails to pass data and validation checks, Actian DataConnect can automatically restart the step that failed.

“Because we deal with data from disparate insurance clients, the data types are diverse. Files range from small and manageable to complex and large,” says Vinod Kumar, Assistant Vice President of Software Development and Information Technology at Hannover Re. “With this set of diversified sources, we needed to pay special attention to the integration process because the more sources, the more complicated the process. Our data model needed to be comprehensive enough to hold all possible data values from these various sources and to provide a consistent data structure for any downstream process—now and in the future. The power of Actian DataConnect enabled us to manage all this very efficiently.”

For Hannover Re, the benefits of Actian DataConnect are clear and compelling. Onboarding and data gathering now occur quickly, accurately, and painlessly. New customer information is readily accessible within the SAP system, where all the teams at Hannover Re who need that data can find and work with it to make faster, better decisions and present customers with new offers and superior options.

“We saw a need to give all stakeholders in the organization more organized and trustworthy data,” says Kumar, “so they could make effective decisions quickly and efficiently. We set forth with a goal that our integration effort would provide a single, consistent source of data for any downstream processes, and Actian DataConnect made that happen.”

When a key component of a global banking solution arrives at its end of life, a number of questions arise. How best to replace the key functionality? What more might a new solution enable the bank to deliver? How to migrate existing data sets to a new solution? What processes and requirements have changed over time and how best to invest now for future requirements?

All these questions whirled in the air when one global bank learned that neither IBM nor its channel partners planned to continue support for Netezza Twinfin, the analytics solution that this bank had relied on for years. Answers soon coalesced and the bank’s requirements became clear: they wanted a solution supporting a single data repository for all positions, across all asset classes. This would facilitate ad hoc analysis of positions and their sensitivity to market factors such as volatility, interest rate changes, timing, and more.

Additionally, the bank wanted a solution that would enable it to ingest, analyze, and act on massive volumes of both structured and unstructured data in short order. It had long been wanting deeper and more timely insights into its risk exposure (Netezza provided risk and opportunity value analyses only once per day via batch data dump), so the bank set its sights on a solution that could deliver insights in sub-minute intervals throughout the day.

And, of course, questions of performance, scalability, reliability, and cost were always present. The bank wanted the flexibility to build new analytical solutions as well as ease of management and maintenance to keep total cost of ownership (TCO) as low as possible. The solution needed to be secure yet not so rigid that it would preclude scaling with the bank’s needs over time.

Solution

After reviewing numerous alternatives and performing the requisite due diligence, the bank chose the Actian Vector Analytics Database and the Actian Data Platform to replace Netezza Twinfin. Actian Vector is a true column-store database that provides unrivaled abilities to connect, analyze, and act on big data. It turns even commodity hardware into a massively parallel high-performance data processing and real-time analytics solution capable of processing complex queries entirely in memory and returning actionable insights up to 30 times faster than competing solutions.

Indeed, as part of its search process the bank compared the performance of Actian Vector against Netezza Twinfin. Actian Vector, running on a compute cluster with only 5 nodes, performed on par with Netezza—which ran on 24-node compute cluster. The bank also performed a security audit and compared performance values relating to data compression, volume handling ability, load times, stress, and ad hoc query responses. Actian Vector outperformed its rivals in all these areas.

The bank also appreciated the flexibility and scalability ensured by Actian Vector. Actian Vector runs on commodity hardware on top of Windows or Linux. Adding nodes to a compute cluster is trivial in comparison to what the bank was used to with Netezza.

Sealing the deal was Actian’s level of expertise and commitment to partnership. Working with Actian, the bank saw a seamless pathway leading from Netezza to Actian Vector, which ultimately made the decision to embrace Actian Vector an easy one.

Benefits

Today, the bank relies on Actian Vector to analyze both structured and unstructured data. It can run complex analytics in record time—gaining insights in moments that previously took hours or days. As anticipated from the proof of concept tests, the Actian solution has outperformed competing solutions in nearly every category, including the critically important time-to-value category.

Because Actian Vector can deliver extraordinary performance using only a small number of commodity compute nodes, the solution has exceeded the performance and functionality benchmarks of Netezza while lowering overall cost of ownership. By replacing its legacy technology, the bank estimates it will save $20 million over five years.

Has the bank encountered any downside to a decision that seemed so easy to make? Evidently not: the outcomes have been so satisfactory that the bank has already set its sights on incorporating Actian Vector into its consumer business and securities groups.

Gone are the days when media companies stayed in their lanes. No newspaper company worried about preparing content for a TV show. No TV company worried about formatting a story for a weekly news magazine. Today’s media companies present content in innumerable formats—text, graphics, audio, video, and more—and they need to anticipate pushing that content to an ever-widening range of devices, from televisions to smart phones, TV screens, tablets, and more.

For content consumers this variety of formats can be exciting and satisfying, but for the developers who build the platforms that media companies use to capture, organize, and present all this content, the complexity and inconsistent structures create serious challenges.

“When we drew up the blueprint for the editorial system that was to become EidosMedia Méthode, we knew that we were going to need an object-oriented database,” says Ismail Gazarin, Chief Information Officer at EidosMedia, a worldwide leader in the development of content and knowledge management systems for news and media organizations. “But the kind of data we would be handling is complex and relatively unstructured—news stories with associated multimedia, page layouts with their geometry and multi-edition information. We knew we wanted a solution that would provide maximum flexibility to add and change data fields without having to completely modify the database structure. We also knew that storing this data in a conventional relational database would result in terrible performance. We needed something else.”

Solution

The EidosMedia team began subjecting object-oriented database solutions to a stringent program of comparative tests. “Editorial platforms are mission-critical systems and have to provide 24/7 reliability for their users,” says Gazarin. “The Méthode platform we were building might be supporting a thousand or more users in a given customer environment, so performance, reliability, and scalability were the characteristics we were looking for.”

After putting the contenders through their paces, the Actian NoSQL object database emerged as the clear winner. Actian NoSQL object technology enables developers to handle database requirements for extremely complex object models with ease and has proven itself in the field by supporting applications with very large-scale data management requirements. Actian NoSQL requires no mapping code to store or retrieve objects, so schema modifications can be handled without application downtime. Built-in fault tolerance, synchronous and asynchronous replication features, high availability, and excellent scalability made Actian NoSQL the ideal solution to support EidosMedia Méthode.

“We were impressed by the responsiveness and the reliability of the Actian NoSQL dual-cache solution,” says Gazarin. “It had already proved its reliability in demanding environments such as banking and defense, so we were confident that Actian NoSQL would stand up reliably for our customers.”

Benefits

Today, Actian NoSQL sits at the heart of EidosMedia Méthode, enabling editorial content to be published simultaneously through multiple channels—from print, Web, and mobile to tablets, e-readers, and syndicated distribution points. Actian NoSQL and EidosMedia Méthode manage the content behind more than 600 media titles and 200 websites. The solution is used by local and regional publishers on five continents, as well as large publishers—such as The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times—whose content is constantly being updated and whose reach is truly global.

“Actian keeps adding support for the features we value,” says Gazarin. “We’ve recently incorporated the latest release of Actian NoSQL into EidosMedia Méthode. The enhancements Actian has made enabling NoSQL to take greater advantage of multicore hardware make it that much easier to scale EidosMedia Méthode in step with growing customer needs.”

In the age of Big Data, it’s not uncommon to hear that this or that company is analyzing huge volumes of data. But Bucap S.p.A is different: it’s not analyzing huge quantities of data; it’s archiving huge quantities of data. And it’s not archiving its own data; it’s archiving data on behalf of public, private, and governmental organizations throughout Italy. Some of that data may not be touched for decades, but some of that data may be required at a moment’s notice. Bucap’s customers need to know their data is secure and that they can access it without delay if and when necessary.

How does Bucap ensure long-term data security and integrity alongside near-term accessibility and accessibility? With the Actian Ingres hybrid database.

Solution

Back in 1995, after several years of expanding its presence in the archiving and storage marketplace, Bucap management realized that meeting the company’s growth goals would depend on smart investments in IT. Not only could Bucap offer services supporting the archival of physical records, but by investing in IT it could also seize a competitive advantage by offering efficient, high-quality services for archiving digital data.

Bucap knew it needed to build an archiving solution that would be scalable, reliable, highly available, and easy to maintain in order to support all the business processes of storage, indexing, retrieving, and displaying documents at the service levels it wanted to offer its customers. Two goals stood out: make it easy for customers to manage their own data, documents, and images autonomously; and reduce the time and cost involved with doing so.

“We evaluated the available enterprise-grade relational database solutions that were available at the time to identify the one that best met our requirements,” says Ruggero Rinaldi, general manager at Bucap. “After careful analysis of features and performance characteristics, we chose the Actian Ingres Hybrid database.”

Actian Ingres: A Winning Choice

The Actian Ingres Hybrid Database combines the industry-leading Actian Ingres transactional and Vector analytic databases, bundled with world class integration and enterprise monitoring. Bucap chose Actian Ingres because it offers a complete, full featured relational database management system (RDBMS) with a suite of options for easy access to information. Actian Ingres also offered greater ease of administration than competitive products, which would enable Bucap IT personnel to spend more time focused on other technical opportunities.

To facilitate customer access to the database, the Bucap IT team used Actian OpenROAD to build a customer-facing portal. Its intuitive design enables customers to manage and access their archives directly instead of having to engage a Bucap staffer to search for and retrieve documents. As a result, the cost of providing access to archived information dropped dramatically. Concurrently, because customers could access materials faster and whenever they needed them—even in the middle of the night—customer satisfaction with Bucap’s offerings, already high, rose even higher. Compared to traditional internal archiving solutions, the security, flexibility, and any-time access that Bucap offered was much more attractive.

Benefits

The combination of Actian Ingres and Actian OpenROAD has enabled the IT team at Bucap to develop, adapt, and customize its document management and back office software application offering to meet continuously changing business and customer needs.

“The application has grown alongside the company and customer demands,” says Rinaldi. “We’re continuously adding new functionality and are managing ever-greater volumes of data. We’ve also taken advantage of the fact that Actian Ingres runs on multiple platforms, which has enabled us to capitalize on the insight and experiences we’ve gained to manage information in other systems used within our company.”

The decision to adopt Actian Ingres has produced a number of positive impacts for Bucap:

• The company has been able to in-source critical administration skills, including database administrator (DBA) and database system administrator (DBSA).
• It has been able to test the new releases of Actian Ingres in order to grow and consolidate its internal skills.
• It has gained a high degree of flexibility when it comes to managing core services and adapting processes to meet the ever-changing needs of customers.
• It has achieved a level of database availability and reliability that enables it to guarantee uninterrupted operations and access to customer services.

Today, Bucap is recognized not only as a complete provider of data archiving and storage offerings, but also as a company capable of offering highly customized and specialized services to meet unique customer needs. It operates eight storage facilities in Northern and Central Italy, housing more than 1,000 linear kilometers of physical documents and more than 500 million digital documents. On any given day, Bucap customers retrieve more than 4,500 documents while digitally archiving more than 68,000. At the heart of this solution lies Actian Ingres and the supportive relationship that has evolved between Bucap and Actian over the course of many years.

“Back in 1995, Actian offered solutions that better met our technical and financial requirements than any other company on the market,” says Rinaldi. “And so it has remained. We are very satisfied with Actian Ingres, as well as our relationship with Actian and Actian Services. We have been able to achieve all our goals and, thanks to Actian and the Actian Ingres database, our business is on solid ground. We are in a great position to develop new and innovative products in response to the challenging business opportunities presented by our customers.”

When it comes to renting tools, equipment, and related services, HSS Hire has been the go-to company in the UK for more than 60 years. The firm developed not just a reputation for excellence but also a nationwide network of supercenters and branch offices complemented by a logistics infrastructure that made it easy for customers to obtain the tools and services they needed—whenever and wherever necessary.

Not surprisingly, HSS was keen to get onboard when the Internet began to gain momentum. It developed HSSlivehire.com, a site where customers could get up-to-the-minute information about equipment availability, check their invoices, and more. The site tied into an early version of what is now the Actian Ingres hybrid database, which HSS had already been using to support its operations—from tool and equipment inventory management to accounts management, invoicing, availability, delivery, and more—for years.

But HSSlivehire.com placed demands on the database that its traditional back office operations had not. The more customers interacted with HSS online, the more types of online interactions they wanted to conduct, and therein lay a challenge: HSS had not designed its core database with online payment in mind. The design of the database itself was not problematic, but it could not provide support for encrypted online transactions. HSS knew that it needed to provide an environment that was 100% secure if it was going to accept credit card transactions through its website.

To gain the level of encryption it needed HSS was going to have to upgrade its database, and therein lay the second challenge: HSS lacked the internal IT resources and expertise to perform the database upgrade. So HSS did what comes naturally to a leading firm in the resource rental world: It hired experts who could come in and perform the upgrade quickly, properly, and cost-effectively.

The Solution

HSS turned to Actian Services, a dedicated team of database professionals who work with companies to get the most from their Actian software installations. With a focus on helping organizations reduce costs while maximizing flexibility, Actian Services always takes an open and honest approach to meeting customer needs. The group offers a wide range of products, services, and technical skills designed to ensure maximum return on investment and optimized deployment time.

Benefits

Actian Services helped HSS upgrade its database to a version that would provide the transaction encryption support that it sought. After working closely with HSS to understand key business and process relationships, Actian Services put in motion a plan to upgrade the HSS database. Over a period of just one weekend, the team upgraded the software, verified that the upgrade was fully compatible with internal procedures, and benchmarked the new database to ensure that the upgrade did not compromise application performance.

“We knew we had to upgrade our database in order to benefit from encryption and make sure our online website offering was fully compliant,” says Dennis Joseph, Computer Services Manager at HSS Hire. “Actian Services was on hand to help us upgrade our database with minimum disruption. They ensured a smooth transition to the new database platform.”

Behavioral health data is incredibly sensitive, and Allegheny HealthChoices, Inc. (AHCI) processes a lot of it. The non-profit corporation was formed in 1999 by Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, to monitor the transition of Medicaid-funded behavioral health services to a managed care environment, but over the years its role evolved. Today is oversees, monitors, and manages the flow of Medicaid data between stakeholders, including a variety of downstream insurance companies and government agencies. 

As they contemplated that new role, members of the AHCI IT team realized that the firm would need a data infrastructure better designed to ingest the large, complex EDI files containing user claim and program data. The information in these files needed to be filtered into AHCI’s data warehouse and then made available to the insurance companies and agencies that needed it. AHCI receives more than 100 EDI files every day from multiple sources, all of which need to be processed quickly, accurately, and securely. The task had grown too large to be managed manually, so AHCI needed to find a way to automate procedures.

Automating With Actian

Actian DataConnect has been at the core of running AHCI’s day-to-day business operations since its inception. DataConnect offers a hybrid integration solution that enables an organization to quickly and easily design, deploy, and manage integrations on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments with no limits on data type or volume. With its emphasis on reuse and adaptability, DataConnect is engineered to help cost-effectively integrate diverse data and applications from numerous endpoints.

At AHCI, Actian DataConnect automates and streamlines the entire EDI ingestion and transformation process by collecting and transforming the EDI files at scale and loading them quickly into the AHCI data warehouse, thus making it available for distribution to downstream stakeholders. DataConnect helps eliminate the enormous labor costs that this would entail if it were to be done manually. Additionally, it streamlines AHCI’s process, enabling the firm to be more innovative and facilitating the delivery of better patient experiences.

Focusing Resources for Greater Impact

Early on, IT leaders at AHCI estimated that it would take as many as five people working full-time to transform and load the incoming EDI files manually–not a good use of the non-profit’s limited resources. Instead, they decided to use Actian DataConnect to automate these file transformations. This would enable the firm’s IT personnel to focus on more innovative projects aimed at improving healthcare services. 

“We receive more than 100 EDI files each day, which we need to process quickly, accurately, and securely,” says Jody P. Wright, Manager of Applications and Data Systems at AHCI. “We wanted to automate the whole process from the start, and Actian DataConnect provided the critical functionality we needed. It enables us to transform EDI data quickly and load it into our own data warehouse seamlessly.”