MVF creates bespoke data environments for its business units with Snowflake’s data warehouse

MVF, a leading customer generation company, has chosen Snowflake to develop bespoke data environments for its business units to democratise data across its entire workforce. Through this approach, MVF is providing data right at the hands of different business units, driving faster decision-making across the organisation.

Friday, 31st August 2018 Posted 6 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Founded in 2009, MVF helps businesses access a range of new global customers through its innovative customer generation platform. It is one of the fastest growing tech companies in the UK, named the fastest growing technology company in 2013 by Tech Track 100 and featuring on the list for the third time in 2017. Most recently, MVF secured second spot in The Sunday Times 2018 UK 100 Best Companies To Work For survey.

Generating 10 million customers for 800 clients over almost 100 regions, the company’s investment in a data-driven culture that runs throughout the entire organisation has played a major part in its success to date.

Mike Johnson, CTO of MVF, said: “For us, data is the lifeblood of our organisation. Without data, we simply wouldn’t be able to offer the best possible service for our customers. Since using Snowflake, we’ve been able to overhaul our internal operations by quickly and easily deploying bespoke data environments that have improved data accessibility and actionable business decisions across various units.

“For example, our sales team can focus prospecting in the verticals that offer the best opportunities for our business, while the marketing teams can use data to monitor a huge range of marketing metrics. The rapid growth of the business has only increased the need to democratise this data across the entire workforce, and not exclusively siloed to the data analytics team.”

As the company continued its rapid growth, it was producing even larger volumes of data in which to analyse and democratise. MVF sought a partner to facilitate the development of a new data environment that could support its existing bespoke technology stack and put key data in the hands of its employees.

Mike continued: “Initially we were using AWS Redshift to make sense of our data, especially as we were already using AWS for our cloud infrastructure. But we experienced some issues with this solution, which was creating frustration across the business. We are a very agile and dynamic team, so any bottlenecks need to be removed as quickly as possible.

“Migrating to Snowflake has removed these bottlenecks. We’re now able to manage peak periods of data analysis, which is typically between 8am-10am. Many large data platforms charge on a fixed price, but as Snowflake is based on a consumption model we’re only charged during periods of activity, substantially helping us reduce our data warehouse operation costs. On top of this, we are seeing data in real-time rather than any access delays from platforms that struggle with large datasets, boosting business decision-making.”

“Data should not be seen as something exclusive to the data or IT teams”, said Thibaut Ceyrolle, VP of EMA at Snowflake Computing. “For a company that has operations in both the US and UK it’s important that data is accessible across the entire organisation, and individual data environments help meet the needs of specific business units to boost data driven insights. MVF has quickly realised how easily these data environments can be developed to continue propelling itself as a burgeoning tech company.”