Ometria delivers customer insights faster and more reliably with Aiven

Overview

Ometria is an AI-powered customer marketing platform that enables retailers to deliver a consistent, personalized customer experience across different channels. The company’s powerful customer data platform brings together data from all customer touchpoints to create a detailed profile of each user. Their solutions deliver customer intelligence insights that marketers can use to optimize campaigns, segment shoppers based on predictive behaviors, determine when a customer is likely low on a replenishable item, and more.

The challenge

To deliver this kind of customer insight, Ometria must gather, unify, and analyze large amounts of data, and make that data readily available in their platform where their customers can access it whenever they need to.

To do that as effectively as possible, Ometria needed to enhance their data processing capabilities while reducing costs and latency. At the same time, they needed to increase the stability of their solution.

For quite a while, Ometria had been using fully managed and hosted AWS RDS with a PostgreSQL instance type, but the company was running into severe technical challenges relying on that setup. For example, traffic would spike when customers ran reports or launched campaigns, resulting in reliability and stability issues for their customers. To accommodate peak traffic, Ometria had to overprovision their AWS environment, but that led to increased costs.

The solution

Seeking a better way forward, Ometria began looking for a new database solution.

At this time, members of the Ometria team saw how other companies like Zalando were using storage optimized instances for database workloads, so they began to search for a vendor who could offer such a solution.

Soon they came across Aiven’s benchmark report, which includes instances with local SSDs, and decided to try out Aiven for PostgreSQL. The results impressed the team, particularly how effectively the solution’s native SSD performance was able to handle their often spiky data load.

“We haven’t seen another provider in our region in AWS that uses native SSDs,” explains Al James, CTO of Ometria. “No other provider could give us the performance boost we needed.”

Aiven for PostgreSQL is now central to Ometria’s entire architecture. Postgres receives all the data that flows into Ometria and is synthesized by the reporting and analytics engines, marketing automation and personalization tools that plug into Postgres.

Ometria also decided to take their reliance on Aiven further. The company is now using Aiven for Elasticsearch, which is the easiest solution for receiving data logs given their Postgres setup. In addition, they are looking into Aiven for Kafka, particularly due to the availability of managed upgrades and hosted Kafka Connect.

The outcome

As a result of having Aiven manage their backend data components, Ometria is now able to focus more intently on building their core applications while Aiven automates the mundane tasks away.

Here are the main benefits that Aiven has brought for Ometria.

1. Faster reporting speeds

Thanks to Aiven for PostgreSQL instances with local SSDs, reporting is dramatically quicker for Ometria’s customers, enabling their users to get the insights they need in less
time and with less frustration. “We’ve saved our customers something like 2.6 years of staring at a loading spinner,” Al says.

2. Reduced costs

To cope with peak loads, Ometria previously had to overprovision their AWS environment. Now they can save money by running Aiven’s PostgreSQL instances with lower machine specifications, and then scale up only when needed.

“Aiven has been a great partner in providing managed services and offering better and lower cost of ownership than comparable AWS offerings,” Al says. “The products are very easy to use and allow us to make decisions about technology choices faster than we would before, and with less risk, so that we can evaluate a wider pool of technology choices.”

3. Less maintenance

With Aiven, Ometria’s platform is future-proof. They will always be using the safest, most secure, and most feature- rich version of PostgreSQL without having to do any heavy lifting themselves.

“When a bug happens in the PostgreSQL universe, Aiven upgrades to the latest version so we don’t have to worry about that,” Al continues. “The solutions don’t require a dedicated maintenance team to run them.”

4. Rapid expansion

The improved PostgreSQL performance enables Ometria to land larger clients and larger contracts — which was instrumental in their recent Series A funding achievement.

“We’re dealing with bigger clients than we dealt with before, and Aiven was one of the strategies we used to be able to achieve that,” Al says. “We had a situation where certain workloads at this new client size wouldn’t have been feasible or cost-effective in RDS. That was huge for us.”

One last piece of advice?
“Never host your own stuff,” Al concludes.