Open Source Datenintegration in der Praxis: Fallstudien und Anwendungsbeispiele (Folge 2)

CASE STUDIES Practical Open Source Data Integration Case Studies & Implementation Examples Volume 2 Table of Contents Levelor streamlines its B2B integration .............................................................................................. 4 “ETL unlimited” package for Business Intelligence at Virgin Mobile .................................................. 6 SupplyFrame automates catalog building and updates ..................................................................... 8 MyBuys personalizes the online shopping experience..................................................................... 10 UNHCR improves decision making with data integration and cartography...................................... 12 Theis Consult manages and analyzes German road traffic ............................................................. 14 Car & Boat automates classified ads processing with Talend Integration Suite. ............................. 16 Page 2 Practical Open Source Data Integration Case Studies & Implementation Examples Over the past few years, open source has established itself as a key component of the overall data integration market. Many organizations have adopted this model for their data integration projects. These organizations span all industries, all continents, and all company sizes. More importantly, their projects range from ETL for business intelligence to operational data integration, data collection, cleansing, consolidation and loading, analytics etc. This document presents a few selected case studies, illustrating real-life implementations of open source data integration and its associated benefits. Page 3 Industry: Manufacturing Type of project: Operational Data Integration Levolor streamlines its B2B integration Switching from hand coding to Talend Integration Suite saves 25% in support time each year and increases efficiency of IT operations. The challenge of hand-coded integration Revolutionizing the industry Hand-coding data integration with a small team is deman- Levolor has set the standard in window fashions, de- ding. Factor in a custom product with frequent maintenance sign innovation, product quality, and customer satis- and the project becomes even more difficult. Levolor offers faction. The first to offer cordless custom blinds, as its window furnishings through a variety of retail systems well as being the first to bring color to blinds, Levolor and programs for companies purchasing its products. The continues to pioneer window décor and remains the coding of these systems—particularly at the source level— most recognized name in the industry. Products, in- can get very complicated. Levolor needed a tool that would cluding custom, stock and sizable blinds and shades, make the entire process more friendly in terms of being able basic and decorative drapery hardware and custom to step back and really look at what business issue was drapery, offer consumers more options than ever to being solved, rather than dealing with low-level coding. complete their windows. “Essentially all the ETL processes were homegrown,” says Today the company is a division of Newell-Rubber- John Shafer, Levolor’s EBusiness Application Developer. maid. a global marketer of consumer and commer- “This type of coding is complicated, not only in terms of cial products and a powerful brand family including understanding business processes, but because it was de- Sharpie™, Paper Mate™, Parker™, Waterman™, veloped using different methods and implementations. It’s Rubbermaid™, Calphalon™, Graco™, Levolor™, very hard to come in behind someone to understand why Kirsch™, BernzOmatic™, Vise-Grip™, IRWIN™ and they did what they did.” Lenox™. Real-time integration Levolor is headquartered in High Point, NC. Newell Rubbermaid is headquartered in Atlanta, GA and em- Levolor does business-to-business data integration and ploys over 20,000 employees worldwide. needed to reliably process information from a variety of sources—for product orders from various reseller partners; for customers visiting the Web site; and for other retail sys- tems. Inbound information flows run 24x7 while shipment information and status details are communicated in res- ponse. They also needed to integrate data for third-party reporting as when, for example, Levolor compiles informa- tion from different sources about a product and the type of customers who purchased it. The tool had to let them monitor the jobs, but also pro- vide source control and the ability to deploy from a de- velopment environment to a production environment. Page 4 “Because of the complicated nature of the products,” says John Shafer, “there are some routines we need to be able to code in. With some of the products we looked at, that Key facts was difficult.”source control and the ability to deploy from a development environment to a production environment. Founded in 1914 Talend Integration Suite allowed Levolor to move to a stan- Custom product with frequent maintenance dard package to develop jobs that could be reused over Wide variety of retail systems and programs time. “When you look at the code and the critical nature of the information you’re moving,” said John Shafer, “you Flexible, easy to use, realize that you need a tool to be able to manage these Forum and ecosystem support jobs—to make sure that they operate daily, hourly, howe- ver frequently they need to—and to give the business the B2B data integration, Enterprise deployment featu- flexibility to adapt to new opportunities as they come along. res, Out-of-the-box tool capability It becomes obvious that you need a tool which can handle a lot of these capabilities out of the box. With Talend, the components are in there and it’s essentially a matter of put- ting things together. Code what you absolutely have to, but rely on the graphical nature of the product to be able to take ‘‘ care of a lot of things that are common from job to job.” Another major benefit is the additional sup- A lesser consideration was cost. “Other packages we eva- port that Talend provides. We’ve been able luated from traditional ETL suppliers were in the $230,000 to go to them with module ideas for co-deve- range plus support costs. We were looking at the problem lopment. It’s hard to see how this could be from a risk avoidance angle, rather than from a returna- accommodated—both in cost and time—with ble investment standpoint but, even so, with Talend, if we the traditional software model. Add to this have any custom needs we can have the resources with the availability of the forum and ecosystem very reasonable cost and lead time, to develop a custom that leverages the open source offering of component to perform tasks that we’re going to be levera- the software package and I believe you leve- ged repeatedly. That’s one of the big advantages of open ’’ rage a Community when working on various source. Add in the ability to download and try Talend Open projects. I think this is unique to Talend. Studio before purchasing and Talend Integration Suite be- came an obvious choice.