The Challenge

As the top online retailer in the Netherlands and Belgium, bol.com has grown massively in a short amount of time. Their innovative team is data driven and customer focused. They were having challenges analyzing their data because it was on an overloaded Hadoop cluster that was taking too long running some jobs. At the time, their analysts were using Platfora for self-service data preparation and visualization. Shortly after the go-live, Platfora announced its acquisition by Workday and with that the discontinuation of the product. Instead of maximizing the potential of doing self-service business intelligence (BI) with Platfora, bol.com was challenged with finding a new solution for BI on a tight deadline.

The Solution

The team at bol.com captured the lessons from their Platfora implementation and completely renewed their BI technology stack. They moved all their data from the on-premises Hadoop cluster to Google BigQuery on the Google Cloud platform. They also moved their team to Tableau for visualizing data and off of Platfora. By adding AtScale as the layer between Google BigQuery and Tableau, they provided their 1600 BI users with a live, fast connection to their fresh and historical data without the need for additional data engineering.

The Results

The move to Google Cloud provided a lot of computational power during the last two months of the year when bol.com is busiest with holiday shopping. Leveraging AtScale’s Universal Semantic Layer™, bol.com’s BI users have a live connection to data to perform more timely analysis. Acceleration structures created by AtScale’s Autonomous Data Engineering™ are utilized in more than half of bol.com queries enabling BI users to load over 70% of their Tableau workbooks in less than 10 seconds. These same acceleration structures drastically reduce the amount of compute required to run each analyst’s query providing bol.com with additional ROI with Google BigQuery.

ABOUT BOL.COM

Since being founded in 1999, bol.com has become the biggest online store in the Netherlands and Belgium for buying books, toys and electronics.

• Over 11 million customers
• 3.5 million visits per day
• 23 million products
• 30,000+ partners who sell on the bol.com platform
• Over 6,000+ bol.com pick-up points in the Netherlands & Belgium
• 2,000+ employees

ABOUT ATSCALE

The Global 2000 relies on AtScale – the intelligent data virtualization company – to provide a single, secured and governed workspace for distributed data. The combination of the company’s Cloud OLAP, Autonomous Data EngineeringTM and Universal Semantic LayerTM powers business intelligence resulting in faster, more accurate business decisions at scale. For more information, visit www.atscale.com.