Raw data into business value

This automotive giant designs, builds and distributes a wide range of vehicles. Headquartered in the US, it operates on a global scale.

Even though the company had C-level commitment to adopt Azure and cloud infrastructure, organizational and technical issues slowed its migration progress.

As cloud platforms matured and became access points for emerging tech such as large language models (LLMs), and with thousands of data scientists, analysts, engineers and other employees needing centralized storage for petabytes of data and scalable compute, accelerating modernization efforts became a high priority.

Once a solid data foundation was established, the enterprise was keen to spin up and productionize analytics and experimentation capabilities across the organization.

We were engaged to provide the blueprint and best practices to drive the Azure migration.

By leveraging technologies such as Unity Catalog for Azure Databricks, MLflow and Azure DevOps and the company’s existing Azure Data Lake, our solution included:

• Reusable patterns, processes and tooling to implement common workflows for pipeline orchestration

• Targeted inventory of core data assets to enable projects and teams that were cloud-ready at project inception but hindered by platform immaturity

• A socialization plan to educate data practitioners on platform features and best practices to prepare teams for onboarding

• Onboarding hundreds of data practitioners (analysts, scientists and engineers) for daily Azure and Databricks usage

With a robust data foundation on Azure, we are now applying a best-in-class, replicable approach and working in collaboration with the organization’s Enterprise Data Analytics and Insights (EDAI) team to advance several analytics work streams, including:

• Clickstream customer journey data (enable the marketing analytics team to leverage high-value behavior)

• Media investment optimization

• Digital transformation for the company’s enhanced safety and driving solution

• Telemetry data (assessing usability and value of data, proposing and build new derivative assets)

By making the strategic shift from on-prem to Azure, the automotive giant is now positioned to take full advantage of cloud innovation and access emerging technologies to modernize its business.

From an operational perspective, the migration has been advantageous in a number of ways:

• Provides the ability to scale in a cost-effective and timely manner

• Enables centralized KPI definitions

• Facilitates rapid prototyping and self-service

• Allows use case activation utilizing the development of common, reusable patterns 

Users have confidence in the integrity of organizational data and are empowered to make informed decisions that support business goals. The power of Azure provides a secure data foundation and a launching pad for various impactful data products:

• Powerful data syndication capabilities

• Automated monitoring of data quality

• Well-documented and discoverable data assets

• Reduced development and delivery time, with less time spent procuring required data

• Traceable data lineage provides ability to identify issues and mitigate compliance risk

• Stringent data security processes and requirements limit the exposure of sensitive data 

We continue to support the automotive company as it explores the potential for new use cases and further innovation on its Azure data platform.