From Spreadsheets to Cloud Nirvana with Ascend.io and Sigma Computing
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Brazen provides virtual and in-person career fair solutions, streamlining the hiring process for organizations seeking top talent. Their platform makes hiring more accessible and efficient, helping recruiting teams save time and money, build new candidate pipelines, and achieve their hiring objectives.
Brazen, amidst explosive growth, encountered signifificant challenges in scaling its data operations. The team grappled with a growing backlog of internal and customer requests that took weeks
to address, creating a bottleneck in report development due to the additional workload and maintenance required.
Initially, Brazen’s data team depended on a multitude of spreadsheets for analytics, limiting each analysis to a single document—a time- consuming and ineffificient process. Manually extracting CSV fifiles from various sources rendered the reporting process disjointed and slow, leading to outdated data by the time reports were generated.
A transition to Python scripting introduced a level of automation, but this also presented new challenges, such as the complexities of data modeling and the need for automated scheduling, which further added to their workload.
"With Ascend, we’ve been able to keep our data engineering team small and nimble, while attaining world-class results. That translates to more funds for other initiatives, and an outsized ROI."
Ed Barrientos, CEO at Brazen
During a trial with Ascend, Brazen’s team discovered the automated data pipeline capabilities they were seeking. They established a production pipeline before the trial’s conclusion, taking advantage of Ascend’s intuitive interface to effortlessly integrate raw data connectors and transformation steps within Google BigQuery.
Ascend’s auto-scaling infrastructure offered a cost-effective, hands-off approach for Brazen to quickly build data pipelines that produced clean tables ready for reporting — no extensive data orchestration expertise required.
The team immediately cleared their data pipeline backlogs, enabling anyone with SQL or Python expertise to begin molding the data directly. A significant development occurred when Sigma Computing was applied to these clean datasets, providing analysts with a spreadsheet-like interface for real-time data analysis.
This new setup allowed Brazen to transition from monthly reporting to immediate, live metric visibility. They were able to offer new customer dashboards on the same day, rather than in weeks, and monitor product performance instantly.
Ascend facilitated access to new data sources, including straightforward connectors to third-party data services like Salesforce and versatile Python connections to bespoke APIs. This enabled the team to integrate data sources into their analytics swiftly, without the need for CSV files.
The small and mighty team triumphed over competitor programs several times larger, thanks to the partnership provided by the whole Ascend support team. Ascend gave Brazen’s data team unparalleled support and insights into automation best practices — guiding them at every juncture of their data journey. The synergistic relationship between Ascend and Brazen underscores a shared commitment to leverage the power of automation to help organizations spend more time working with data instead of on data infrastructure.
"From the time needed to pass security review, to time-to-first-value, Ascend has beaten even my most aggressive timeline expectations by at least 50%."
Eugene Medynskiy, Chief Product Officer at Brazen
By leveraging Ascend, Brazen achieved a remarkable operational efficiency. With Ascend’s automation capabilities, the team can now efficiently manage their pipelines, warehouses, and BI initiatives without needing to hire competitive data engineering talent to scale. This led to substantial cost savings and allowed Brazen to remain agile and responsive.
Furthermore, Ascend simplified and accelerated the process of data ingestion and transformation, which allowed BI products like Sigma Computing to shine. The result is a more streamlined, cost- effective and nimble data operation that’s well- equipped for the future.
Brazen’s data journey is evolving rapidly, with an emphasis on optimizing and refining their operations through data. They plan to continue using Ascend’s data pipeline automation to ensure they can continue to scale and add new datasets to their analytics whenever they need.
Their strategic direction also emphasizes leveraging Ascend’s multi-cloud functionalities to explore new cloud data processing engines that might provide advantages for their data science needs. By exploring innovative integrations between their datasets with minimal overhead, Brazen aims to seamlessly push data into customer-facing systems where it can continue to drive the business forward.
"Ascend’s ready-to-go infrastructure lets us jump right into data modeling, avoiding the high costs and delays of starting from scratch. This direct focus on modeling and data delivery enhances our ROI."
Paul DeSalvo, Data Engineering Manager at Brazen