Enabling Executive Decisions by AWS Data Integration

Education Technology Organization

An business enhancing education with solutions that power learning.

This organization supports all levels of education including both public and private sector with technology used by thousands of schools around the globe. In addition to using Salesforce internally, the company offers a Salesforce integration that connects student data to learning activities. An ongoing push for online learning has fueled innovation and growth which comes with a growing utilization of the organization’s CRM platform. CapStorm solutions seamlessly integrate Salesforce with AWS, creating a mirror image of the underlying Salesforce data set that is then integrated with an analytics solution for near real-time data visualization.

Graphic of a cog in the CapStorm blue color.

Industry

Icon of a person's silhouette in CapStorm blue.

Company Size

Puzzle piece icon in the CapStorm blue color.

Specialities

Icon representing tech stacks in the CapStorm blue color.

Tech Stack

Blue, black and white cubes floating and falling.

Problem

Salesforce data connectors did not provide the high frequency, high fidelity capabilities that were needed to incrementally replicate Salesforce data to AWS.

The business’ systems of record are all integrated with AWS. This facilitates a steady stream of data to populate a data warehouse that connects to data analysis tools including Power BI. Salesforce data was not included initially – multiple vendors offered solutions that claimed to perform Salesforce data extraction, but the performance was slow and the data repository was either CSV-based or in a database that could not dynamically mirror Salesforce data structure changes. Even an analytics vendor’s own Salesforce connector had row limitations that prevented the business from gaining the desired data insights. As an additional complexity, the business did not want to add any internal infrastructure, instead preferring to increase their AWS RDS utilization.

Solution

  1. Incremental Data Extract

    Data is replicated incrementally from Salesforce into the enterprises’ AWS relational database. This Salesforce data extract runs automatically twice a day, adding new Salesforce records to the database and updating any existing records to match the current state of Salesforce. Each backup also updates the structure of the database if any changes are made in Salesforce, so that any new custom objects, packages, or changed field definitions are mirrored automatically in AWS.

  2. Data Warehousing

    The AWS RDS is owned entirely by the customer, sitting within their own AWS environment. This self-hosted approach enables the business to seamlessly synch the CapStorm maintained database with the organizations’ data warehouse.

  3. Data Analytics

    The data warehouse connects to the organization’s analytics and data visualization tools, driving operational reporting across all systems of record from a single data repository. This includes unlimited retention of Salesforce field history along with record snapshots in order to generate the required data needed for long range forecasting. Heterogeneous environment reporting keeps executives aware of the current state of the business, with the ability to achieve near real-time data insights.

Graphic of white, black and CapStorm blue colored cubes stacked on each other.

Outcome

Checkmark inside of a white circle.

Executive enablement driven by the creation of a single source of truth for all business data.

Checkmark inside of a white circle.

Increased Salesforce administrator productivity with a set-it-and-forget-it Salesforce data extract.

Checkmark inside of a white circle.

Precise revenue forecasts archived by unlimited Salesforce trend reporting.

Want results like this?

Become a CapStorm Insider

Subscribe to the CapStorm Forecast

Name
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.