Revitalizing the Web experience

Consolidating database knowledge

SumAll offers a connected data platform that enables companies to correlate their knowledge from different internal and social media databases in order to tweak their websites to offer their clients better Web experiences.

“We offer simplification, making it easier for customers to understand their decisions,” says Korey Lee, the company’s CIO. “We take [up to] 5,000 metrics and whittle that down to five to 10 key metrics to enable them to visualize the data.”

With that data, the company can help ensure its customers have the best Web experiences. But in order for SumAll to provide that knowledge, the company needed a data warehousing and analytics solution. SumAll started by building its own database in 2012 to augment a third-party solution it had installed a year earlier, but by the end of the year, it determined the combination didn’t work to fulfill its clients’ needs. The combined solution couldn’t scale, and the analytics layer didn’t deliver the necessary performance, Lee explains.

So SumAll reached out to BitYota, a firm that provides data warehouse as a service. Lee was familiar with BitYota because both companies started around the same time in 2011, and they had crossed paths as young tech startup firms.

“The solution isn’t cheap, but it’s a lot cheaper than working with a much larger company, and BitYota has the agility of a startup,” Lee says. “Its team was very quick to customize the solution to our needs. The ability to pull together SQL and unstructured data is not an easy task. They helped us customize our database for quicker recurring queries.”

The solution also scales to keep up with SumAll’s growth, which has been 20 to 30 percent every 90 days for the last several quarters. To date, SumAll has been using the BitYota solution primarily for its small and midsize customers. Soon Lee expects to start using BitYota for SumAll’s enterprise customers as well.