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Case Study: CBT Nuggets
Real-time insights
| Sales & support
Featuring
Sam Calvert, Director of Business Intelligence
Keith Johnston, Software Developer
Omnata products
Connect for Salesforce
Data stack
Business value delivered
• Reduced custom code to manage data syncs in Salesforce by 97%
• Saved $200k per annum in Salesforce developer resource costs
• Increased accessibility and granularity of insights for sales and support teams
About CBT Nuggets
For over 20 years, CBT Nuggets has been a leading provider of professional training in IT, project management, and office productivity. CBT Nuggets delivers its courses online with trainers that are renowned for their expertise, industry-wide credibility, and engaging personalities. They serve 20 thousand customers with 60 thousand end-users on their platform.
Working together
We were introduced to Keith and Sam from CBT Nuggets by our technology partner Rockset, a real-time analytical database (Watch their Rockset customer story). They were exploring Reverse-ETL for data syncs, but were dissatisfied at the latency and inability to cater for high volume data use cases. CBT Nuggets became an early adopter of Omnata Connect's support of Rockset and their feedback helped us to deliver a number of valuable product improvements.
Use cases
Described by Sam, "Salesforce is a nexus for their teams who access information originating in many different sources." The sales team tracks orders and product adoption, the learning support team looks for insights and activities from end-users, and finance requires transactional data like payments, refunds and tax.
The previous solution
CBT Nuggets had built and maintained an internal website plus a complex infrastructure of micro-services and APIs to sync data back and forth between systems. Keith pointed out that this architecture was resource intensive, tightly coupled and was difficult to make changes to. The event-based data syncs were prone to breakages that were difficult to reconcile and re-sync after the fact. On top of this, they had to maintain thousands of lines of custom Apex in Salesforce, solely for data syncs.
Omnata is part of a total overhaul of how we view Salesforce internally. It’s not just a better tool, it’s a better philosophy. My job is to put useful data in the hands of my company and Omnata puts it in a tool people are already familiar with. It reduces the cross functional expertise my team needs by eliminating Salesforce development knowledge barriers and live-querying data on-demand cuts expensive Salesforce data storage costs and doesn’t negatively impact performance. This all simplifies the cost benefit analysis of what data to present.
Sam Calvert, Director of Business Intelligence
A data warehouse centric approach with Omnata and Rockset
CBT Nuggets has optimised each component of their stack for efficiency. DynamoDB to capture and store data, Rockset to analyse and query it, Omnata to integrate it, and Salesforce to organise teams.
They re-architected their Salesforce deployment to leverage real-time External Objects powered by Omnata Connect. Their sales and support staff can easily see key metrics and transactional data related to an account. With Omnata Connect and Rockset, data is live-queried, so it’s always up to date and their staff never need to flick between source systems.
With Omnata as a vital component, CBT Nuggets delivered an architecture that was more reliable, maintainable and changeable at a lower cost. Quantifying their resource savings, they were able to:
Reduced custom Apex code in Salesforce by 97%
Reduce demand for 4-5 full-time Salesforce developers down to just one tech generalist, saving around $200k in annual resource costs.
Increasing the granularity of insights down to individual learners, the product’s end-users, without data storage overheads.
Keith Johnston, Software Developer
Partnering for success
CBT Nuggets provided invaluable product feedback for us to optimize performance with Rockset. Keith continues, “Omnata is not just a great product, but a great company. We were using Rockset views, and while they had support for them, there were some optimizations that could be made. Omata added a feature that allowed us to populate Rockset Collections with sample data for each view that sped up all the Rockset queries tremendously. Another feature they added allowed us to easily promote configs between Salesforce environments. They were always there to help us with the integration and made sure it was a success.
What’s next?
In future, Sam and his team plan to build out more metrics and insights like LTV and renewal likelihood scores that will be delivered to users in-context using Omnata. Since Omnata is config based and the data is queried on-demand, it’s fast and easy for the team to experiment with new use cases.
