Slack
Join us at the Snowflake Summit in Las Vegas, 26th - 29th June. Click for more information.
With Matillion ETL and Snowflake, Slack reduced the time needed to create critical revenue metrics from up to 6 hours to just 30 minutes.
Their success
About
Slack brings together people, data, and applications by providing a single platform where people can effectively work together, find information, and access hundreds of thousands of critical applications and services to do their best work. Slack is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, and has 14 offices around the world.
Company: Slack
Location: San Francisco, CA
Industry: Computer Software
Employees: 1,600+
Product: Matillion ETL for Snowflake
Use Case: Data Warehouse Modernization
Reporting & Analytics Tech: Looker
Website: www.slack.com
The Challenge
Stale data hindered agile decision making
The Business Systems Data unit at Slack aims to empower every team in the organization with accurate data, delivered in a timely way. But Slack’s existing data architecture was preventing it from achieving this goal. The existing data warehouse didn’t support incremental loads, so loading data was time-consuming. As a result, by the time teams received data, it was already around 30 hours old. Plus, the company’s ETL processes were too resource intensive. Teams were writing Airflow and Python scripts for ETL, but scripting required too much development time and was not scalable. To support the growth of Slack, the team needed a modern data warehouse and ETL solution.
The Solution
Helping Slack prepare data to deliver insights
For its modern data architecture, Slack selected Snowflake as its cloud data platform and Looker as a business intelligence tool. The company chose Matillion ETL for Snowflake as its data transformation tool. Matillion ETL for Snowflake is designed to take advantage of Snowflake’s architecture, so it was easy to get up and running. In fact, Slack completed a proof of concept in just a couple of weeks. One key advantage to Matillion ETL for Snowflake was the product’s up-front and predictive pricing. The team had immediate access to all of Matillion’s pre-built connectors for no additional cost. With Snowflake, Matillion ETL for Snowflake, and Looker in place, Slack developed various analytics dashboards and bots serving Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Recruiting business units, enabling the company to use data insights in an agile and meaningful way. The company also developed a bot that delivers key business metrics to executives to help in making key business decisions.
One of my team’s key responsibilities is delivering business systems data to the broader organization so that employees are empowered to drive innovation. Using Matillion ETL for Snowflake makes it easier to do that.
Vamsee Kata, Manager, Platform Architecture & Ops
The Benefits
Taking full advantage of the power of Snowflake
Because Matillion ETL for Snowflake is designed for Snowflake, it integrates easily and allows Slack to use all of the power and features of the Snowflake data platform. Using Matillion ETL’s pre-built connectors, Slack can easily load data from Salesforce, Workday, and marketing applications such as Pardot, Google Analytics, and Facebook. Reusable components and frameworks mean that extracting data from a source can be reduced from up to 10 workflows to just one. Additionally, the team used Matillion’s API Query component to reach even more external systems, like Greenhouse, from which Slack was pulling in recruiting data to combine with Workday data to provide insight for recruiting teams.