Data-driven business operations with Azure Synapse
Think about your dream car, but imagine you should assemble it yourself first before you can drive it? Every car still needs a motor, four tires and car seats before it can bring you to exciting destinations. So, you put together these parts from different suppliers yourself and it took a lot of hassle before the car was ready. A bit inconvenient, right? That is exactly why Microsoft brought together data integration, data warehousing and big data analytics in one smart and scalable solution: Azure Synapse Analytics, with which you can bring your data to next level destinations.
What is Azure Synapse Analytics?
What if you realize you are on a data goldmine, but cannot use its full potential now? Or what if you want to migrate your data safe and sound to the cloud? Azure Synapse is a holistic data platform which allows you to build and manage a modern data warehouse. Microsoft’s PaaS (Platform as a Service) platform offers unique elements working together in Azure Synapse:
- Data warehousing to support business critical data and dashboards;
- Data lakes to clean and explore (un)structured data;
- Interactive visualizations of data with Power BI.
A powerful SQL processing engine provides the opportunity to handle and query large datasets to drive insights for all users. Including advanced security and privacy features. So, no more stitching multiple solutions together for data analytics, but use Azure Synapse for unlimited information analysis.
Azure Synapse use cases
Azure Synapse Analytics is suitable for every business that wants to become more agile, better informed or achieve a competitive advantage by analyzing and utilizing data. Due to its scalability, you can start for example with recording and visualizing financial data or creating management reports. According to usage you can easily expand features up to advanced data science with Apache Spark.
Use cases:
- Accurately predict asset failure to avoid downtime and schedule in-time maintenance.
- Keep track of inventory to reduce storage costs, improve the supply chain and optimize production.
- Create a 360-degree customer profile in order to deliver personalized experiences every time the customer gets in touch with your business.
Youvia establishes exponential effectiveness and a new way of working with Azure Synapse
Youvia, formerly known as the yellow pages directory in The Netherlands (De Telefoongids en Gouden Gids), now performs outstanding online marketing services for SMEs. They had large data sets of leads and customers but did not utilize the full potential of it. In order to improve customer experience, serve existing customers better and launch highly targeted marketing campaigns, the newly appointed Customer Experience Director Roel Verkooijen initiated using Azure Synapse Analytics.
Youvia set up a Business Intelligence (BI) pipeline in which they combined all internal sources (e.g. CRM, ticketing- and billing suite), but also added multiple external data sources. One of which was the Chamber of Commerce. In Azure Synapse all these different data sources are automatically updated, synchronized and merged.
With the use of Power BI, Youvia also developed a proprietary Campaign Suite. Within this suite, the Market Analyzer is servicing their marketers. The Market Analyzer is a Power BI tool in which marketers have an overview of all market dynamics (owned and non-owned) and trends. Furthermore, they can slice and dice and deep dive into data to generate a pre-qualified campaign that fully suit their needs.
Second, Youvia developed a Customer Cockpit for their telemarketers. This solution contains much actionable information about e.g. the customer, personas and their online performance. The Customer Cockpit supports the telemarketers to be exponentially more effective during their conversations and save many hours of preparation.
Third, Youvia’s sales managers are being serviced by a Campaign Performance Analyzer in which they can monitor the performance of a running campaign and make adjustments where needed on the fly.
This full integration into Azure Synapse enables Youvia to take the next leap towards marketing and sales automation. Based on continuous learning cycles, pre-populating future campaigns with personalized offers at the most relevant moment lie on the horizon.
Looking for the ins and outs of Azure Synapse?
At Heroes we are convinced that Azure Synapse Analytics is crucial when you want to transform into a data driven organization. We are passionate about migrating data to the cloud and set up a structured and secure solution. Interested in what Azure Synapse Analytics can do for your organization? Our colleague Ward Eerland, data analytics expert at Heroes, would love to tell you more.
