Overview

pHearst is a century old media conglomerate with cable TV, TV stations, magazines, newspapers and digital media. Since 1887, they have grown from a single newspaper to a global media company with business in more than 150 countries./p

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

pHearst’s CTO became interested in IT expenditure across 60 business units and realized the need to consolidate expense reporting. They had tried repeatedly to establish a consolidated 360-degree view of their IT spend but had not succeeded as the first hurdle they faced was getting the cooperation of each division. In addition to data consolidation, Hearst also wanted to retire legacy mainframe systems and migrate to a more modern cloud-based platform. Traditional Enterprise Data Warehouse approaches were too rigid and slow -- they needed a modern approach that did not require significant up-front planning and big data engineers in order to succeed./p

The Solution

pWith the emergence of big data solutions in the cloud, it was clear that moving to an Azure cloud-based solution would significantly simplify getting a big data infrastructure up and running. However, it still didn’t address how Hearst would develop the data pipelines that would be used to ingest and transform the data, prepare it for high speed querying, and then ultimately monitor and manage the pipelines on an ongoing basis. The client worked with Infoworks to build and deploy an end-to-end solution that automated big data business intelligence analytics workflows./p

The results

pInfoworks’ system was installed in a matter of hours and after 4 weeks of implementation effort, the tech-spend analytics dashboard was completed. Because of the flexibility and agility provided by the combination of Infoworks and Azure HDInsight, Hearst was able to add new data sources in an agile approach, and continuously enhance the data models as they went along. The up-front planning required in more traditional EDW implementations was eliminated. The system could now track and capture changing data from the sources while providing a complete, operational dashboard that monitors the status of the production environment, all while automatically orchestrating the production data flows./p

Metrics

pWith the help of Infoworks to orchestrate data pipelines with 12 data sources and 35,000 tables, Hearst achieved a 24x improvement in time to deployment relative to their system integration estimates. More importantly, Hearst now has the ability to implement future projects without requiring an army of big data experts. The level of automation provided by Infoworks makes it possible for Hearst’s in-house talent to quickly develop, deploy and manage new analytics use cases as their business and data analytics needs continue to evolve./p

The Technology

pInfoworks provides an enterprise data operations and orchestration (EDO2) system that enables companies to unleash the value of their data and launch analytics use cases 10x faster at 1/10th the cost.Infoworks has recognized the inefficiencies of manual coding in data engineering, and has created a data engineering automation platform to eliminate complexity across the entire data workflow. /p

Disruptive Factor

pCompanies looking to undergo digital transformation can spend months building and managing data pipelines that require a costly data experts to maintain. Hearst estimated that a typical EDW approach would have taken them over 24 months to complete and they could not afford the number of engineers necessary to execute. By implementing Inforworks’ EDO2 system, Hearst was able to fully automate their processes and complete the entire project in just 4 weeks, while relying on only one engineer./p

Shining Moment

p“With Infoworks, we are able to implement data analytics projects without having to hire big data experts. These are people with skills that are hard for a 100-year-old media company to attract. Eliminating that need allows us to leverage our data just like our younger competitors.” - Hearst/p