Editor's Note: The following is a joint post co-authored by Shree Dandekar, Director BI Strategy and Konnie Brown, Global Communications
- Introducing RIPTide, the second project from Dell’s incubation program
- Real-time analytics solution for midsized customers is enabled by Dell Boomi and real-time business intelligence capabilities
- Team Express adopts RIPTide and was able to glean business insights in time for their two busiest shopping days of the year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Dell’s incubation program recently celebrated a great milestone, bringing project Sputnik to general availability a couple of weeks ago, and I’m excited to start sharing details about the program’s second project now: RIPTide, a real-time analytics solution for mid-market customers.
Imagine a midsized company collecting data in real time from different sources. Of course they’ll want to convert this data into meaningful insights to improve their business, also in real time. There’s a catch though, they don’t have the IT resources or, necessarily, the expertise to extract those meaningful insights, much less in real time or in plain English.
Sounds like the right kind of challenge to tackle for Dell’s incubation program.
With RIPTide, we designed a solution that can assemble relevant data sets (structured and unstructured) on-the-fly, using real-time data integration enabled by Dell Boomi and real-time business intelligence capabilities for reports, dashboards, analytics, and services for easy deployment.
And it gets even better. This solution simply scales – it can be delivered on a laptop, a server, or an enterprise class platform depending on the customer’s size and needs. A customer also has the option to start off with the Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse and then build the solution on top of it. As part of this project, we’re also exploring to offer this capability as a service for customers to use within their private cloud environment, using Dell managed services.
We wanted to help customers simplify interpretation of their data – ask a question, get an answer. What is my sales pipeline in real-time? What is my account status with a given customer? What are they saying about me in social media? What does my retail stock look like? Is my fall collection trending on Pinterest?
We put our project to task, just in time for the two major shopping days of the year – Black Friday and Cyber Monday – with Team Express, a San Antonio-based sporting goods retailer with a small IT staff responsible for maintaining their legacy SQL-based transaction system as well as reporting on daily business activities. Team Express, just like other midsized companies, is challenged with assembling data from various sources, including Salesforce.com and their legacy transaction system, to glean actionable business insights, quickly and easily.
With the RIPTide solution running on a PowerEdge R720xd 12th generation server, Team Express is now able to capture key business metrics along with new insights, including:
- Top-performing products by region, customer, and revenue
- Close-rate per salesperson
- Sales team productivity
- Opportunity and lead conversion rates
We will demo this solution at Dell World in the Data Insights neighborhood, and Brian Garcia, CIO of Team Express, will give a theater presentation on his team’s experience with the solution at 3pm CT on Wed., Dec. 12, and 11am CT on Thurs., Dec. 13.
Here’s what Brian (pictured on the right with Eugene Klymov, Dell) has to say about his experience with this project, “This solution will transform the way almost all of our departments think about how our business is behaving. Now we can see more, we can do more and we will get more with less effort.”
We hope you will stop by to see the solution in action, and we look forward to keeping you updated on project milestones to come. Follow #DellRIPTide on Twitter.
Follow Shree @shree_dandekar on Twitter.