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Ecotrak: rebuilding a data platform and then running it

Ecotrak makes facility management software that helps businesses track and maintain their physical assets, built around giving operators real-time data, insight and prediction rather than a record of what already happened. That promise puts the data platform at the centre of the product, and it means platform problems are product problems.

LOCATION

Irvine, California, United States

COMPANY SIZE

Mid-scale Enterprise

INDUSTRY

Information Technology › Explore solutions for this industry

Cloud data platform rebuild and daily operations

We began with a due diligence phase rather than a proposal. That meant analysing the existing systems, talking to every business stakeholder, and having the technical conversations properly before recommending anything. What came back was a written report with specific plans tied to what the business was trying to achieve.

The work that followed cleaned up the existing cloud data platform rather than replacing it, which was the right call for a company with customers already relying on it. We added processing jobs, implemented the pipelines for the various data sources feeding the platform, built the semantic layer that sits between raw data and the questions people ask of it, and built the operational dashboards.

The second part of the engagement is less common and, for Ecotrak, at least as valuable. We took on the daily running of the platform so the company could concentrate on its business. That covers the everyday requests that come in from supporting their customers, producing reports as they are needed, raising overall data quality, and optimising the database architecture, schema, queries and processing jobs on an ongoing basis rather than in an annual project.

Platform rebuilt and then operated day to day, with data quality and query performance improved continuously rather than periodically.

Related solution: managed data platform operations

A data platform is not a project that finishes. Sources change, volumes grow, queries that were fast become slow, and quality degrades unless somebody is actively holding it up. Most companies discover this about a year after the build team leaves, when the platform has quietly stopped being trustworthy and nobody can say exactly when that happened.

ThirdEye Data offers the ongoing version as well as the build. For a software company whose own product depends on the platform, as at Ecotrak, that means we handle the operational load so their engineers work on the product rather than on pipelines. Practically it looks like continuous small work: tuning queries before anyone complains, fixing a source before a report breaks, and steadily raising data quality rather than running a cleanup once a year. It is unglamorous, and it is the difference between a platform that ages well and one that has to be rebuilt.

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