The explosion of technological advancements over the last decade brings about valuable and intangible assets to the business world including generating billions of bits of data. 

With the help of cutting edge computing systems, businesses leverage this “data” and turn it into useful information. This processed information is put to a variety of uses such as push advertising via various interface points online. This function promotes sales, optimizes operations from obtained insights, and is crucial for other decision-making strategies.

The ease of accruing customer and business performance data insights brings about the issue of dealing with too much data. How can businesses get the best data and most value from analytics?

With the current pandemic COVID19 impacting economies world over, here is how Netflix uses big data and data analytics to its advantage by leveraging the surge in demand for OTT and viewership.

 With over 100 million subscribers and growing, the company collects huge data, which is used to create targeted user-specific advertisements. If you’re a subscriber, you’re familiar with how Netflix suggests the next movie or web series to watch. This is done using past searches, time spent on an average, and watch data. This gives Netflix insights on what interests the subscriber most. 

What Is Data Warehousing, Cloud-Based Data Warehouses, And Why Is It Needed?

Data warehousing is the electronic storage of a large amount of information gathered by a business in the course of its operations. It stores data from the businesses’ operational and external databases. A business data warehouse is designed to run queries and analytics on the data derived. 

A data warehouse houses data from multiple (perhaps hundreds) of sources in a single location and can convert data from all sources into one unified format with high quality. Businesses benefit from such data in the form of obtaining reliable actionable insights and the ability to make informed decisions. For scalability among growing businesses, a data warehouse can be on-premises or cloud-based. 

Cloud-based Data Warehouses

Cloud-based data warehousing enhances the core benefits associated with on-demand computing: enables far-reaching user access, offers almost limitless storage, increased computational capacity, and offers the ability to scale despite paying only for usage. Most popular cloud-based data warehouses are Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure, and Snowflake DB.

Benefits of Data Warehouse

Forbes quotes, ”Running critical analytics under disparate data silos or even small sample datasets will not provide a business with accurate or comprehensive insights. Big data analytics requires a cloud-based infrastructure that can store, manage, and compute high volumes of data to provide valuable predictions to all employees of a company.”

1. Cost-effective Yet Scalable

With cloud storage, the system can instantly scale up to deliver as much or as little compute that whenever necessary. Since the compute and storage components are separate, whatever is essential is purchased without any additional upfront cost (such as hardware, server rooms, networking, adding extra staff, etc.).

2. Easy And Quick Deployment

With the cloud, business users can build their data warehouse, data mart, or sandbox in no time. This environment allows organizations to pay for only the necessary resources. IT and business teams can develop and/or prototype new services and products without the large expense of added infrastructure.

3. Enhanced Capabilities

A cloud data warehouse improves business intelligence enabling other applications to deliver faster, smarter insights to the business. This is brought about by availability, scalability, and performance. With a cloud data warehouse, businesses can engage the complete spectrum of data warehousing beginning with business analytics, data integration, IoT, then move into a complete, integrated environment. (Which we will discuss in due course)

4. The Data Warehouse Is Self-serviced

Essentially, managing the data warehouse is no longer a hassle. In the cloud environment, the business can benefit from a fully automated management, automated patching, and upgrades. Data is more available and accessible than ever before and teams can direct attention and resources on more strategic aspects of providing value to the business.

5. Data Security

Cloud data is not located in disparate locations so engineers can build and iterate on specific controls to safeguard data. Cloud encryption services such as multi-factor authentication make the exchange of data across regions and resources incredibly secure. Most cloud data warehouses include virtual private networks (VPNs) to reduce possibilities of a breach.

Data Integration and Salesforce 

In a cloud-based data warehouse, the sources hold data in an analytics-ready state that is trusted, consistent, and permanent. It accumulates data from all sources and all departments so that data from any source’s format is in uniform. 

Data integration tools play a critical role in turning data into useful, actionable business intelligence-related information. With the right business data warehouse software and integration, companies can excel in the area of usability. Thus organizations can use data captured to spot emerging business trends, better understand target customers and demographics.

The Role Of Powerful CRM Applications and Integration

Salesforce has over 150,000 paying customers and it commands a whopping +20% of the market. This is still huge given the number of CRM players in this field. The brand has strived to accomplish a high-performance data environment to allow its users to leverage available data into a highly interactive application. 

Is there a Salesforce data warehouse? Salesforce is not a data warehouse – it is not built to directly handle store and aggregate data from across various functions of the business. Having said that, the Salesforce CRM is extremely flexible and easy to customize. 

With every company implementing a business data warehouse as a well-defined data model for their needs, integration with Salesforce amplifies the usability of Salesforce data to constantly align itself to overall organizational goals.

With Salesforce’s rich features sales are monitored closely, the vibrant community support is reliable for business performance. 

But doesn’t the sales function work as a piece in the big picture? The data will have to substantiate facts and has to be seen alongside data from other systems, such as Excel files, payroll, and ERP systems (the data warehouse).

Salesforce CRM Data Warehouse integration-

• Invoice research is less time-consuming. A huge burden lifted off sales representatives trying to close out a sale.
• Comparisons are a cake-walk across periods. Reports can be generated in no time.
• Incoming ERP data provides insight into crucial information such as close ratios, win ratios, etc.
• Handles challenges with the sales team by issuing detailed critical performance reports. 
• Discovers hidden trends with a detailed breakup of customer activity. 
• Forecasting of sales activity vs. actual sales by generating reports of all sales activities. 

Unifying relevant data with a robust feature-rich CRM application such as Salesforce puts your data warehouse at the center of decision making. Combining Salesforce with a data warehouse improves the accuracy and efficiency of how this data can perform towards demonstrable growth for the business. 

About AppShark

AppShark is both a Gold Consulting Partner and a Product Development Partner based in Dallas, Texas. Our implementation process (which includes customization, set up, and configuration) has been perfected through the many years served in the Salesforce industry. 

We also provide software integration services including strategy, development, and management to enable a continual flow of information from the cloud, premise to premise, or from cloud to premise platforms. If you are a business looking to scale up your operations, you can get in touch with us here.