How to meet the 3 biggest enterprise-scaling challenges

One of the most rewarding aspects of working with both Domo’s product organization and customers is seeing how the Domo platform is being used to deliver critical business outcomes for some of the world’s largest organizations.

When I meet with such customers, I typically ask a key question: In what ways are you scaling your use of data and analytics across your enterprise? 

The responses typically fall into one of four categories. They’re either making mind-boggling amounts of data consumable, fast; they’re giving more people across the entire organization access to data and analytics; they’re setting up environments where their BI teams can innovate; or they’re doing all of the above.

Asking such a question is important because it typically leads to interesting conversations around the “how.” As in, how they’re scaling data and analytics without impacting business performance, how they’re scaling people so they can support more business objectives, and how they’re doing it all in a way that doesn’t compromise business operations.

Such discussions are not only fun and enlightening, they are critical to ensuring that Domo is able to meet one of the biggest concerns of its enterprise-grade customers: scaling.

When Domo thinks about scaling, it thinks about it in three parts:

• Volume and speed, which is all about the ability to run fast analyses on dozens of data sources;
• Pipelines and workflows that are driven by automation, enabling workforces to gain deeper insights, ask new questions, and focus on the kinds of tasks that add real business value; and
• Governance and engineering rigor on a level that can accommodate thousands of users while also giving them room to safely create and innovate.

Because scaling is such a big deal to Domo’s enterprise customers, the Domo product team focuses an enormous amount of its attention on those three parts.

Proof is in the Domo platform’s very core, which enables enterprise scale right out of the box through personalized data permissions (PDPs), enterprise-grade security protocols, and more than 1,000 data connectors.

But there’s a next level to all of this, and it’s where you’ll find three advanced features Domo is rolling out to meet any challenge that comes with scale.

1 – Adrenaline DataFlows

The first of the three new advanced features is Adrenaline DataFlows—or, ADF. ADF’s superpower is its ability to transform massive datasets in mere minutes, which in turn makes for more reliable cards and dashboards.

This allows, say, a mass merchant to quickly discover how a given SKU is performing across any number of stores in a particular region—and then make decisions based on that intelligence without delay.

With ADF, that same retailer could also run analyses such as: seasonality effects on items at a store level; focused outlier detection; and period-over-period performance of important financial metrics by region. The possibilities are endless.

2 – Magic ETL 2.0

Another advanced feature is the new Magic ETL, which is just as intuitive as it was before but now allows SQL power users to build pipelines using code.

Such users can then add writeback capabilities to those pipelines using Integration Studio, updating other systems of record or hydrating data lakes.

One Domo customer that’s using Adrenaline DataFlows and Magic ETL to its advantage is Sweetwater Sound, the largest online music equipment retailer in the world.

Its business use cases range from warehouse performance to forecasting demand. But I love how it leveraged ADF and Magic to understand ROAS (Return On Ad Spend, a common marketing metric) on a digital advertising giveaway campaign.

In short, ADF and Magic enabled Sweetwater to crunch through billions of rows of data and surface clean insights around its customers in an incredibly short amount of time.

As a result, the company was able to quantify the impact of an initiative critical to the business for the first time ever.

3 – Sandbox

Last but not least, there’s Sandbox, which is basically a playground for those who wish to build and iterate on content they have permission to access without disturbing what is already running in production.

In this environment, you can test everything from a simple chart to a complex app before it’s routed through an approval process that controls for quality and further protects the end user’s experience. 

The net-net is a dramatic reduction in errors, better customer experiences, and a collection of data leaders inspired to experiment.

Just ask the Sandbox beta testers at a global video game maker who used the environment to develop, test, and promote individual dashboards to its partners.

This allowed those partners to access relevant console and game-play data and enrich the user experience for their customers.

The bottom line

There are many challenges that come with enterprise scale. But they don’t have to create drag on your business. There are solutions now, and together they form something that makes Domo’s Modern-BI-for-All platform even more powerful: the first-ever, cloud-native dev ops environment.

To learn more about how Domo is helping its customers achieve enterprise scale and how exactly each new feature works, watch “Revolutionizing Modern BI for Enterprise Scale,” a special, September 2021 virtual event featuring Domo product experts and Sweetwater Sound senior data analyst Grant Smith.