The Modern Data Stack
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QuotaPath Implements an All-in-One Data Stack and Starts Leveraging Data Across the Organization
The Start-Up's Guide to a Modern Data Stack
The Right Time to Build a Data Stack
Today’s businesses need the most effective modern data stack to optimize their business processes with insights from the data they’re already collecting across all of their various tools, platforms, and systems.
So, you may be wondering what a modern data stack is. As a definition, a modern data stack is a network of tools that allow a company to transform, store, and organize data from its raw state for data analysis. Organizing and transforming data allows all departments to access real-time data and convert it into useful formats through various portions of the data stack, which is a big step towards modernizing data pipelines.
This collection of tools typical includes:
These tools are then typically paired with a business intelligence (BI) tool or Google Sheets for additional analysis and visualization.
Some benefits include quickly accessing relevant data and customizing elements such as sync frequency, the data transformation process, analytics, and more.
Teaming up with an industry leader like Mozart Data allows you to create a unified data infrastructure, tailor your data stack, and streamline your business processes. Combining your data through a data stack allows for data observability where it matters, so everyone you need to access data can access it, without having to worry about working with different data than someone else trying to answer a similar question. In short, your team can trust your data more when a modern data stack is employed.
Even better — the vast majority of this process can be automated once it is set up the first time.
An example of this process would be data extraction from various marketing and sales reporting tools, loading that data into a warehouse, and then transforming it so it is all compatible for combination into a single dashboard to view your entire marketing and sales funnel. With better funnel analysis you can move onto even more complicated questions like “which of our channels offers the best customer acquisition cost (CAC)?” and “what types of customers have the highest lifetime value (LTV) to our business?”.
Rather than wasting time, resources, and effort on clunky, outdated data storage and manual transformation, you get a streamlined product capable of solving your business data problems.
The core features of modern data stack architecture is a system capable of ingesting data from different sources, storing that data safely, processing it for analysis, and maintaining data reliability. This can be achieved through piecing together a number of individual tools, which typically requires a team of data engineers, or through an out-of-the-box solution like Mozart Data.
A great example of the functionality and benefit provided by an out-of-the-box modern data stack is how QuotaPath began to leverage company data across the entire organization.
QuotaPath wanted to ensure they implemented a better way to provide access to relevant data quickly and efficiently. Up to 80% of the company can now access necessary data at a much more rapid rate than was possible previously by using Mozart Data’s products and services. Now they can rely on the accuracy and integrity of their data for use across all departments of the company.
This business provides commission-tracking software to financial and revenue operations teams. Adding a data warehouse and an ETL tool provided the scalability and convenience needed to streamline their business internally and as a whole.
Before this integration of modern data architecture, the company had frequent latency issues and limited data access. Now, individuals can readily access up-to-the-minute data when needed and leverage that data quickly to provide analytics and produce data in formats that benefit each department. With the implementation of data warehouse and ETL tools like Fivetran and Snowflake data warehouse, their data platform architecture provides seamless storage, transfers, and analytics.
We’ve touched on the tools that make up the modern data stack, but let’s take a closer look at how they can all work together seamlessly.
Some refer to the flow of data from an organization’s various siloed sources to the end state of data analysis (basically, properly implementing a modern data stack) as a data pipeline. With the right tools, it’s possible to automate this data pipeline, guaranteeing faster time-to-insight with better data reliability.
With a tool like Mozart, It’s quick and simple to schedule data tasks to run once they’re set up, effectively automating the ETL and data transformation processes. You can ensure that your data transformations to combine or organize data sets don’t run until the ETL process that provides the “fresh” or synced data has run, saving technical resources and ensuring that out-of-date information isn’t accidentally shared with decision makers.
Data transformation automation allows for faster access to information in customized formats for each individual or department so they can analyze real-time data to help propel decisions and power campaigns. After transformation, any user can use the BI tool of your choice to create analytics, reports, and presentations that fuel decisions accurately — even if they aren’t a data analyst or technical power user.
There are two ways to think about modern data stack companies:
ETL tools and cloud data warehouse providers fall into the first category. Some of the most popular ETL tools include Fivetran, Portable, Stitch, and Hevo Data. The three most common choices for a data warehouse are Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery.
Many of these providers offer incredible solutions, but they do require more resources to implement:
Many companies choose not to invest these resources implementing and maintaining data infrastructure, either to save on total costs or to allocate those resources elsewhere in their organization. These companies choose a company offering an out-of-the-box solution. Aside from Mozart Data, other companies with similar offerings include 5x.co and Y42.
Whether or not you utilize an out-of-the-box solution, you will be able to connect BI tools and other tools, like AI or machine learning (ML) offerings, to your data warehouse.
When we think of the modern data stack, it’s important to consider data reliability. Without consistently reliable data, people lack the trust to make data-driven decisions. Without that trust, it’s impossible to create a data-driven culture where employees and teams inform their strategies with data and, perhaps just as importantly, turn to the data to look for insights that might lead to altogether new strategies.
Solutions like Mozart include additional features, like data alerts and an intuitive data pipeline visualization, to help maintain data reliability. Better data observability means that when something inevitably does “break”, it’s easy to see if something as simple as a data source failing to sync on schedule is the cause, or if something has changed with a data transformation query that might require closer inspection.
Although there are many ways to set up your modern data stack, Mozart Data uses Fivetran and Portable “under the hood” to provide ETL services. These tools connect data to a best-in-class Snowflake data warehouse. The data transformation layer is built on a proprietary, easy-to-use SQL query editor, so you have what you need to prepare and shape your data for vital data analysis with your choice of BI tool or even Google Sheets. Don’t have a BI tool, or don’t want to pay for one? Mozart Data offers a free instance of Metabase to all of our customers.
Because we buy our Fivetran and Snowflake credits in bulk, we’re able to pass on an approximately 30% discount to our customers, making data more affordable for any organization.
The above mentioned additional features for data reliability, observability, and governance all come standard with the Mozart Data platform at no additional cost.
Some of the benefits your company can expect to see when connecting with Mozart Data can include the following.
These are just a few of the many reasons why integrating your own modern data stack using Mozart Data is a smart decision to help your company stay competitive in its market. In many ways, a company is only as effective as its data is used to propel campaigns and services. Integrating these data tools is fast and simple and doesn’t require a high level of technological prowess.
Save time and resources by stepping up your data processes with the most advanced and best-in-class data stack options available. Provide accessible data extraction and transformation options, all connected through a user-friendly dashboard that reduces data errors, latency, and other common data-related issues that can create confusion and miscommunications within the company, which trickles down to a company’s customer base.
Mozart Data is the best-in-class solution for modernizing your data stack and provides the fastest and easiest method for setting up a highly scalable modern data stack. In fact, you can create your customized data stack in about an hour. This service comes with everything you will need, including a Snowflake warehouse.
A modern data stack can change the way your organization works with data. Siloed, messy data takes so long to work with that most organizations have to pick-and-choose where they can make data a priority. But with better data infrastructure, even small startups can act like a big data company.
If you’d like to learn more about how these tools work and how trustworthy data could change your business operations, while saving you time and money, reach out to the team today.
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