Ayan Basu : You said it was about four times faster. What are the key things that accelerated that? Obviously, the coding aspect is one. What are the other things that contributed to the speed, do you think?
Sajid Sayed: Everything is UI based. It's not a separate entity to Reltio. What we had to do was understand the Reltio data model. We had to understand the destination data model but because it came in connected with Reltio, I think that part was very easy for us. There was no environment management. If we had this different environment, we had to make sure we are managing all these different environments which we didn't have to do so we have zero production support team for integration. So as part of that Reltio Integration Hub piece, we log. We need to understand our system from the entire data pipeline perspective so what we do is as part of that Reltio Integration Hub process, we log everything that's happening into the system and now, we have this central portal where we see this entire data transformation that's happening. And so, it just makes it easy.
Ayan Basu: How is Reltio Integration Hub performing in terms of latency, data loads, and any challenges and performance that you ran into? Can you talk about the performance testing?
Sajid Sayed: I don't know if I have the benchmarks that we did but I think what we did as part of our first implementation, everything was in batch mode. I think what we could do if we had to do this again and as we improve the process. Now we can create real-time integrations with Reltio Integration Hub. That is performance that we have to be mindful about. But if you start doing this real-time, and like I said, we are getting the data from the source to this Snowflake area, we are doing a lot of transformation, there are certain data quality checks that we can do in flight. I think that's where we are leading into. Our future states will really have that.
Ayan Basu: Even though you did batch mode and batch loading, and you talked about going real-time which is great, is there anything you encountered that would create any pause or concern in terms of performance or did you feel like the platform itself met your performance criteria?
Sajid Sayed : Yes, it did meet the criteria but I think just something to be careful about, something that we are still in the learning phase. Right now, when we are extracting data out of Reltio, you get this major JSON file. What we'll have to understand is how do we loop through that? How do we compartmentalize that and don't take one big file but a certain amount of data at one time, pass through it, and move it? There are certain things that we learn as part of the implementation, it's not performance or a drawback. It's something for us to learn and know how to use the platform.
Ayan Basu: How much time did it take from the decision of using Reltio Integration Hub all the way to going live into production, what was that timeframe?
Sajid Sayed: The Reltio Integration Hub, it was four weeks’ worth of effort, that includes test and then production. But everything else was not just linear because there were other program and project decisions that we had to make, but just from a dev effort, it took us four weeks to do that. Just a disclaimer, we don't have any complex transformation in that. It's a simple, straightforward pipeline because we had done major of the transformation within the Snowflake area, and this was just the last push that we were doing. As part of that last push, we discovered, hey, there is a lot that we can do in this platform.
Ayan Basu: If you had to code the solution, obviously it would take much longer than four weeks. Is that an accurate statement?
Sajid Sayed: Oh yes. The other problem is then that knowledge is with that developer alone. Now, if we run into any issues with Reltio, it's very easy for somebody to look at it and figure out what's happening. But then we can also go to Reltio Integration Hub support forums and customer support and figure out if there are certain things. But we didn't want to get locked into whether IP is just with that developer, and we cannot use other people in our data engineering team to support the solution.
Ayan Basu: You did mention the fact that supporting the solution long-term maintainability, that's much easier with integration hub as opposed to separate infrastructure, separate integration, that is a whole IT development team that's dedicated to supporting that.
Sajid Sayed: Correct. From a data science team, we wanted to go to market really fast. As many, if you start having these different technologies, we need to have super specialists to support each of them and then DevOps process in each of them. If there is something with a larger memory, we need to increase that memory. And then, if there's a different data source, we need to create tunnels or whatever we need to get to that data source. So now, we have avoided all that by going to a SaaS platform which is natively integrated with these sources and comes with pre-built connectors for most of them.
Ayan Basu: Can you provide some insight into what the longer-term plan looks like with RIH? Obviously, you've had good experiences so far. As you think about one year down the road, two years down the road, can it be that central connectivity integration platform into your larger, broader ecosystem efforts?
Sajid Sayed: I think that's the area that we need to invest in. Bring Reltio close to source as much as possible, move most of it, whatever we can, from batch to real-time and to connect all these different transactional applications that, like we said, we have inherited through growth. I think that is the biggest business value that we can get.
Ayan Basu: You mentioned one of the biggest appealing factors was the fact that the platform does come with a lot of pre-built out of the box connectors that you've already used, the Snowflake connector that's in there and there's others that you can look at. As you looked at these other platforms versus Reltio Integration Hub, what did that look like, the pre-built connectors out of the box? Was that a criteria for comparison as you looked at different systems?
Sajid Sayed: Definitely. We have a very heterogeneous environment. We have Oracle SQL server, postgres, so we have all of that. For us to make sure that there are connectors for... And then, different versions of Oracle, right? We have some of their pluggable databases in Oracle, so we wanted to make sure that we have connectors for all these environments, so I think that's very critical for us. We didn't want to create a single pipeline for one platform for each transaction system that we had.
Ayan Basu: Just one stop shop for everything would be obviously the ideal way to go. Looking back on your integration hub journey and experience, what would you have done differently? What were the learnings? What would you recommend to the people that have joined this call that have maybe haven't used Reltio Integration Hub? Any advice or guidance you would have for them?
Sajid Sayed: I think we looked at RIH very late in our journey and maybe it was just released about that time too. We just started with our problem to solve. So we said, "Okay, I just want to connect from this source to this source," and that's about it. But I think for anybody starting fresh, I would like to tell them that, take a step back, look at what RIH has to offer from a whole platform perspective. There are so many transformations that you could do in flight so see if you can use that. There are so many jobs that you can schedule in there versus... Some of the challenges that we have like Snowflake is a great platform but when you start putting tasks and all that in there, it's just a little hard from a UI perspective to know which bad job is running where. There are a lot of those that you can shift, that RIH can do that for you.
Sajid Sayed: To sum it up, I think for us, especially from a Reltio perspective, we are thinking about integration, we don't have to go out and buy an integration platform. Even if you have an internal integration platform, you don't have to rely on that team to build this integration. You don't need a specialist data integration architect to help you with the integration. Think about these things, these are available to you to build integration. It will just make your life easier and help you get to market faster.