Digital Planet revolutionizes customer experience with Exasol – self-service analytics that work
Digital Planet is one of the pioneers in South African eCommerce and today offers integrated fulfilment and online sales solutions for large corporates and well-known brands in the country. In order to empower its customers based on data, Digital Planet transformed itself from a pure service provider to a provider of business intelligence products.
The goal: from “data push” to “data pull” – i.e. from report provision to genuine self-service analysis.
With Exasol as a high-performance, cloud-based data warehouse, Digital Planet was able to drastically reduce its data load times, increase customer satisfaction and build a modern analytics platform in the Azure cloud.
from 30 to 2 minutes per hour
with direct data access
of working time saved per month
even with limited infrastructure
Digital Planet was founded in 1999 as one of South Africa’s first eCommerce companies. Today, the company develops fulfillment, distribution, and eCommerce solutions for some of the country’s biggest brands. With a clear focus on customer experience and data-driven services, analytics plays a central role in the company’s strategy.
South Africa
600
eCommerce
DWH powered by the Exasol Analytics Engine
As Digital Planet grew, so did its requirements for data availability and reporting frequency. However, the existing architecture with SQL Server and ETL processes could no longer keep pace:
Digital Planet opted for a future-proof architecture based on Exasol and Yellowfin, hosted in the Microsoft Azure Cloud:
Exasol is a long-standing technology partner of Yellowfin – by combining the two systems, Digital Planet has been able to significantly expand its BI capabilities. The new architecture runs on Microsoft Azure and combines visualization, data modelling and performance optimization in a modern stack.
From 30 to 2 minutes – that corresponds to a factor of over 15 in terms of data availability.
Customers can access up-to-date data at any time, even in difficult conditions such as unstable network coverage or limited power supply.
– Dominic Albrecht, Head of Analytics, Digital Planet
Customers create their reports and visualizations independently – without going through the BI team. This reduces internal effort and increases customer satisfaction.
The internal team hardly has to deliver any manual reports – a clear efficiency gain.
Hosting in the Azure cloud means the solution remains flexible – with predictable operating costs.
