Zadara

Zadara’s Cloud Platform simplifies operational complexity through automated end-to-end infrastructure provisioning of compute, storage and network resources. With solutions available on-premises and through cloud and colocation providers, Zadara’s turnkey hardware/software, combined with its pay-only-for-what-you-use model, helps organizations to become more agile without sacrificing features and functionality that enterprises demand.

Zadara operates hundreds of public and private clouds worldwide with an expert team that provides services and support 24/7. Zadara offers all three storage types and related protocols, including block storage (iSCSI, FC), file storage (NFS, CIFS/SMB) and object storage (S3 & Swift). Zadara is headquartered in Irvine, California with locations in London, Tokyo, Yokneam (Israel) and Bangalore.

The Challange

Zadara has significantly evolved and expanded since it started nine years ago. A logical and necessary step as part of their growth was to establish a robust data ecosystem, starting with a great BI foundation for the organization. Zadara’s customers include large enterprises across industries including hightech, finance, and telco, so they needed help for someone that didn’t only understand their BI & data challenges but also those from their customers.

After interviewing multiple companies for over a year, they enlisted Vision BI to help them solve their toughest data challenges which included orchestrating and aligning their product usage data alongside financial data and ERP data to calculate customer usage, customer spend, and to forecast revenues.

In order to achieve this, Vision BI was enlisted to advise on selecting the optimal data stack, engineer the perfect infrastructure, and orchestrate and automate data flows. This data could then be used as the backbone of Zadara’s financial operation with their customers – from Deal win through onboarding, billing to forecasting. In addition, this data also had to provide the company’s management team with transparency and visibility to monitor their progress and inform critical strategic decisions as the company scales.

Organizations wanting to be data-driven is not a cliche for us. We’ve evolved from being a small to medium sized company and it’s amazing to witness how we can now rely on data, collaborate better and become a data driven company. Especially during covid, which needed collaboration and data really became more essential than ever during this period.

- Omer Paz, Senior Director Head of Business Applications

The Solution

As part of the process. Vision BI recommended the optimal data stack for the team. A combination of Snowflake for data warehouse, Rivery for data integration and orchestration, and Tableau for visualization and reporting. This data stack fit their budget and plans, and it accommodated the existing infrastructure and teams.

The game-changing solution for the company was the ability to see a monthy financial forecast at any time based on data that is updated daily. Through a tool which became the “pulse” for the organization, the team has access to the most important revenue data on a daily basis.

In addition, Vision BI helped leveraging product usage data to help Zadar’s team get a 360 customer view on how their solutions are used by customers and which products are more popular. This helps the decision-making process for the company’s product and solution architects, which work alongside sales teams to get under the skin of their users – and make optimal product roadmap decisions.

The implementation of our Business Intelligence system was a significant milestone to Zadara and enabled us to expedite our business growth through automation, planning and forecasting. Furthemore, while automating major operational processes we were able to optimize the company’s performance which resulted in a significant uplift in our Gross Margins

- Nir Ben Zvi, CFO&COO

The Outcome

When Zadara started with BI, their main goal was to provide senior management with the visibility they needed on financials and product usage – and doing so in a way in which manual processes could be automated. Their BI team used to spend a few days every month to gather this data on tasks which are now redundant.

However, since then, the role of BI and the data processes around it have greatly evolved and expanded at Zadara. Reports and dashboards are now widely used by sales teams and middle management. As a truly data-driven organization, teams across the business receive a daily email with a report on the status of their accounts or their business operation.

Their recently built dashboard for the sales order process, which helps them monitor the sales funnel and onboarding timeline between opportunity creation and delivery has been a game changer for the organization. Having transparency and visibility on inefficiencies throughout the process help them reduce the order period between 15-30% – a huge win for the business.

The company’s excel sheets with numbers which had to be manually updated has been replaced with a screen that showcases a live dashboard that showcases the pulse of the business. From financial performance, to forecasting to sales & delivery pipelines.

Zadara’s vision to orchestrate all data processes didn’t only save them time and money – but also help them modernize the business by leveraging all data points and democratizing access to insights across all teams and divisions.

OP

Omer Paz

Senior Director Head of Business Applications