2021 Data Innovation Award Nomination: Kaplan: Enterprise Data Lake

[Karen]

What were the underlying reasons for the need of data? Describe the business and technical challenges the company was facing and how data integrations can help. *

• Experienced technology strain from disconnected systems and applications with large datasets - Operated with limited understanding of students’ responses and usage across products and services

Describe your data strategy and how you executed the strategy. Include details on how SnapLogic played a role in the strategy and execution, including Snaps and other SnapLogic products/features.

Kaplan looked for an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) that could help
them obtain data on student performance, customer issues, product usage,
and corporate financials. They also sought a partner that would complement
both their digital transformation journey and their big data strategy.

As cloud-based company, Kaplan implements Amazon Web Services as their
preferred partner to lead their big data initiative. With SnapLogic, Kaplan has
created their own data lake within Amazon Redshift, and ingested data from
Amazon Kinesis, S3 buckets, Amazon DynamoDB, and AWS Lambda. In addition
to ingesting data into their data lake, Kaplan also placed SnapLogic behind the
scenes to create a big data platform using Amazon EMR.
Kaplan has integrated more than 50 applications in less than a year, and plans to
integrate 40 more applications in the next year.

Who was and how were they involved in building out the solution? (Please include the # of FTEs, any partners or SnapLogic professional services who were involved on the implementation)

We had a team dedicated to building out this data lake that can build integrations on SnapLogic. However, we didn’t have a dedicated full-time employees focusing on building integrations on SnapLogic.

What were the business results after achieving this data strategy? Describe how your company, departments, and/or employees/customers benefit from the data, and include any measurable metrics.

• Created an enterprise-standard technology connecting systems across the business
• Enriched data reporting to fuel innovation in products and services
• Ingested data from 50+ applications into data lake
• Reduced time to create data reports from 4 weeks to 3 days