GetInData now Xebia

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I work at Engineering in Atlan

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Data catalog and Data Goverance 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire GetInData | Part of Xebia to accomplish?

• Implement OpenLineage layer into our stack for Airflow and Spark

SOLUTION

How did you find GetInData | Part of Xebia?

• Online Search
• Referral

Why did you select GetInData | Part of Xebia over others?

• High ratings
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from GetInData | Part of Xebia were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Extending support for Airflow and Spark as data source was part of our roadmap and we adopted OpenLineage as our standard for this project, we were looking for a reliable partner with expertise in the OpenLineage community. GetInData was part of the entire implementation and collaboration on all community releases and changes, both on the Airflow side and on OpenLineage. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We took the project to production and focused on stability issues together. Contributed some testing changes to Ariflow + OpenLineage integration via the OpenLineage community. Today we support Airflow and Spart as our data sources. 

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

We engaged in weekly syncs and detailed JIRA scrums. The GetIndata team was detailed in their task and updates via JIRA and Slack. There were a lot of pointers that were open and new to both of us, GetInData was eager to understand and helpful to improve the standards. 

What was your primary form of communication with GetInData | Part of Xebia?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their deep technical domain expertise and strong community engagement were impressive.

Are there any areas for improvement or something GetInData | Part of Xebia could have done differently?

Since we were working on community-driven work, more documentation on how things work internally would help the community users to get onboarded easily. 

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Integrations Lead of Select Star

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Automated data discovery platform that helps teams find, understand, and govern their data across various sources in a unified way.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire GetInData | Part of Xebia to accomplish?
To integrate OpenLineage, aiming to give our customers a clear and comprehensive view of their data flow within their platform.

SOLUTION

How did you find GetInData | Part of Xebia?

Referral

Why did you select GetInData | Part of Xebia over others?

• Great culture fit
• Referred to me
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from GetInData | Part of Xebia were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

The scope of work with GetInData included the full lifecycle development of an integration with OpenLineage. This encompassed architecture design, development, testing, and comprehensive documentation. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success include:

• Ability to seamlessly connect ETL tools to our platform, enabling automatic data lineage generation.
• Better oversight of data dependencies and transformations
• Reduced time and complexity required to connect ETL tools

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Throughout the collaboration, GetInData was quick to respond, easy to communicate with, and demonstrated a clear understanding of our needs.

What was your primary form of communication with GetInData | Part of Xebia?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their ability to quickly grasp complex requirements and translate them into practical solutions, combined with their proactive communication and responsiveness throughout the project.

Are there any areas for improvement or something GetInData | Part of Xebia could have done differently?

There’s nothing I can think of that GetInData could have done differently—they delivered effectively on all fronts of the project.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Head of Data Engineering of Related Sciences

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Related Sciences (RS) is a data-driven drug discovery studio. RS uses a proprietary machine learning platform to identify the best new drug discovery opportunities for every disease, organizes them into structured investment portfolios, and then operates them leanly over a specialized platform designed to take full advantage of the last decade's transformational R&D and productivity innovations.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire GetInData | Part of Xebia to accomplish?

• Connect existing data catalog to BigQuery
• Improve existing data catalog dashboards
• Data visualization tooling improvements

SOLUTION

How did you find GetInData | Part of Xebia?

Referral

Why did you select GetInData | Part of Xebia over others?

Referred to me

How many teammates from GetInData | Part of Xebia were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

What was your primary form of communication with GetInData | Part of Xebia?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

1. Integrate existing data catalog with GCP BigQuery 
2. Improve existing data catalog dashboard 
3. Integrate/improve existing data visualization tooling

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

1. Existing data catalog integrated with BigQuery 
2. Existing data catalog dashboards improved 
3. Data visualization tooling improved

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

They responded well to the requirements and specifications, and adjusted when needed along the way. In general great collaboration.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Willingness to adjust in regards to the team structure and goals as needed. Able to fairly quickly adjust to our internal processes.

Are there any areas for improvement or something {provider_name} could have done differently?

There were some aspects that we have discussed internally, and adjusted on the go.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of Intelligent Health, a health company that focuses on the gamification of activities. One of our core productions gamifies walking and cycling to work through physical activity incentives.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with GetInData?

We were undergoing a complete rebuild of our backend architecture within AWS. We wanted a long-term vendor to be a part of our data play because a big part of changing the direction of our company was making data a central plank.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

GetInData provides us with data engineering. They’re responsible for our data infrastructure. Their tasks include setting up our data pipeline, data visualization, and reports. The first project we’ve done with GetInData is building an MVP of our data pipeline connecting AWS to Google Big Query and Google Data Studio. The team is available in case of any issues or snagging. 

What is the team composition?

Our core team has two developers, one of whom has done 80% of the work. We also have a project manager. 

How did you come to work with GetInData?

We found them via Clutch. 

How much have you invested with them?

So far, we’ve spent around £25,000 (approximately $30,000 USD). 

What is the status of this engagement?

We first touched base in November 2021, kicked off the project in January 2022, and the engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

GetInData has helped democratize access to our data; they’ve delivered on that as a proposition. We run data reporting daily to drive the success of the game. Although we had some level data with our previous infrastructure, we now have instant access to our data daily thanks to the reports we get from Google Data Studio, which they’ve set up.

How did GetInData perform from a project management standpoint?

They meet deadlines and stay within our budget. We use Asana for project management and Slack for communication. The team is super responsive and picks up comments quickly in the chat. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’m impressed with GetInData’s deep knowledge of data engineering principles and possible architecture approaches. They’re very good at articulating the pros and cons of any given situation, and they help us navigate the pathway to success regarding data. Their core specialty of data is their unique proposition. Moreover, I’ve been staggered by their flexibility level and ability to get the job done. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t think there’s anything they need to improve; we’ve been really happy all around. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Don’t hesitate to get in touch with GetInData and let them demonstrate their capabilities. When looking for a vendor, I spent a lot of time trying to deep dive into the principles of data. I would have saved time by going straight to an expert like GetInData and having conversations about approaches.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a Product Owner of Platform team in Truecaller and I work together with the data team to build, maintain and improve the Truecaller's data platform.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire GetInData?

Our data platform was created more than 6 years ago and we counted with GetInData since day one to help us with big data challenges we faced. Some of the projects we hired GetInData: - 1st Big Data Platform in Truecaller using Hadoop - Migration to the Cloud using Google cloud platform - Migration from Hadoop to Big Query and other Google Native tools.

What were your goals for this project?

For the first big data platform projects, our main goal was to create a robust and scalable data platform to support de increase data demand. For the google cloud platform migration project our main goal was to reduce the management overhead of having a on premise data center and also make use of better tools for our data platform. For the latest projects, our main goal was to descentralize our data platform and allow our main stakeholders to be independent and unblock self service analytics. We also aimed to improve the stakeholder's query processing time.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

GetInData is a known company in Stockholm market for having projects with big companies like iZettle and Spotify. Since both companies have similar tech stack, we thought contacting GetInData to understand their knowledge would be a good idea.

Describe the project in detail.

Once GetinData onboarded, together they helped us identifying the best solutions for the challenges we had for multiple projects and aiming to achieve the goals we had. We did a lot of POCs of different solutions either using cloud native or open source tools. After all the process to choose the tool, we made a plan of implementation and migration taking into account the multiple stakeholders we had and their timing. The implementation and migration phases were very smooth and we followed agile methodologies, it was an advantage to have engineers from GetIndata that knew very well the technologies so they could also help us with our learning curve.

What was the team composition?

We had 3 Data Engineers, 1 DevOps and 1 Data Analyst to support out projects.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The migration to the cloud and google native tools was an example of a very successful project allowing our stakeholders with more flexibility and a lot of different tools to achieve their goals. According to our users feedbacks: "It is a big data platform, the tools are up to what is on the market and the initiatives to adopt more and more tools for data platform, do not stop. All actions that are taken, they fuse into this scope. "

The query processing time improved 20x after all the changes made in our platform together with GetinData. We can also highlight that the cost of our data platform per Daily Active users is very low, around 0.25 cents per 10k users, what is considered a success with a platform the size it is.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Since the beginning, we made one team sharing the same goals. So our experience with GetIndata is that they were completely part of our company as we are. They were participating in all agile meetings, like daily standups, retrospectives, sprint planning and sprint reviews. That made the communication to be super efective even though we were sitting in different locations.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We were super impressed with the quality of their work and the knowledge of their engineers. They have very high standards in terms of code quality, organisational skills and are always willing to contribute with their best. They also are very friendly and easy going people, what made our collaboration more fun.

Are there any areas for improvement?

There's nothing I can recall of what could have been done differently. Keep up with the good work, we ended up with an amazing platform and we made a brilliant team together.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Acast is the world’s biggest and fastest-growing podcast platform, and the engine powering creators, advertisers and listeners everywhere. I work as Senior Vice President of Engineering.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire GetInData?

We started working with GetInData to faster rewamp our data infrastructure in AWS and rewrite and migrate our core data pipelines.

What were your goals for this project?

The initial goal was to setup data infrastructure in AWS and rewrite and migrate our core data pipelines that were running in Azure. Once that was up and running they worked on different data driven product initiatives, e.g. podcast creator insights and machine learning driven ad-tech features.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Worked together with the founders at Spotify and hence knew their competencies. GetInData is focused on data and cloud which was what we were looking for and they had people with the right profiles available when we needed it.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

People from GetInData extended our existing data team and was an essential part of bootstrapping our new data infrastructure in AWS. Once we hade the foundations up and running we decentralised the data team into our customer facing product teams where they supported the data driven product development.

What was the team composition?

Started off as a small team of two that then grew to about six. Data team was composed by data engineers and data scientists but when we decentralised the data competence they worked in cross-disciplinary teams only the full tech stack for their products.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

- Successful migration to AWS - High service levels on core data, both internally and externally - Decentralised operations of data into product teams

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We did not use GetInData for project management, that was dealt with in-house in our existing teams.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They did a very good job in finding people that fitted in Acast both technically as well as culturally.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m a senior architect and development team manager at CSG International, a computer software company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire GetInData?

We needed to design a production environment to run the product in AWS.

What were your goals for this project?

We need to build a fraud detection product using Hadoop technologies on a tight deadline, but we didn’t have an experienced Hadoop expert and were struggling to find a strong consultant.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

A consultant company we worked with and trusted recommended them to us.

Describe the project in detail.

We began by discussing our strategy and explaining our business requirements. These sessions helped us develop both trust and understanding. They moved into the design part, which was split by several checkpoints where we could verify their work and adjust their focus. After, they helped us build the secured HDP (Hortonworks Data Platform) in AWS and complete acceptance tests.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

They’ve met our expectation and goals and pushed the project forward.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Their communication is very good. We had spot checkpoints in the design phase and daily standups during implementation and testing. Everything has gone smoothly.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their extensive knowledge regarding everything related to Hadoop operation tasks is outstanding. They’re quick to respond, easy to communicate with, and able to accurately understand our needs.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No, not that I can think of now.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm a product manager at tanglr.com. Our e-commerce business aggregates products from more than 150 websites and more than 500–1000 offline stores. We process products and display them on the B2C side for shoppers to search from this entire variety of 10 million products. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with GetinData?

Our project required expertise with very specific technology. We hired GetinData based on their specialized technical skills. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

GetinData leveraged their technical expertise to use Apache Kafka and Apache Flink technology for our solution’s pipeline process and microprocessing. We began with a small proof of concept or initial prototype project to assess how adept their knowledge was. Once we felt comfortable working with them, we decided to start a more significant project together. 

All the data is stored in Apache Cassandra. They helped us fine-tune the ecosystem to enhance the speed and scalability. They definitely imparted a substantial amount of knowledge to our in-house team.

What is the team composition? 

We typically worked with 2–3 people from GetinData.

How did you come to work with GetinData?

We found GetinData through a reference. They work with technologies that overlap significantly with the ones we use. We got in touch with them and had initial discussions about how they could use different technology to help us out. 

What is the status of this engagement?

Our project started around October 2017 and lasted approximately 3–6 months.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

I can confidently say that GetinData is a team of subject experts for Apache Kafka and Flint. We found them to be very skilled at using those technologies. They define the right problem statements for our project and found solutions. From a collaboration standpoint, we didn’t have any problems with communication. If we get a chance in the future, we will definitely engage with GetinData again.

How did GetinData perform from a project management standpoint?

We preferred to call and text them, and they cooperated with us from that regard. I didn’t find any issues with the project management. They were always online. GetinData defined the cadence of meetings perfectly and organized the project methodically.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Our project with GetinData was very focused on our core problem statement. We had a very clear bullseye to target. The team worked on a regular basis without needing too much involvement from our side.  

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s nothing that I can think of. GetinData is very professional and highly skilled from a technology perspective. The services they provided for us were very good. 

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CTO at FreshMail, an email marketing and services company based in Krakow, Poland. Our employees serve thousands of primarily Eastern European business customers of all sizes. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire GetInData?

Our core product focuses on providing an easy and friendly email marketing platform through which almost 1.5 billion messages are sent every month, requiring us to deal with a vast amount of data. Because of this, our company decided to invest in a number of large scale data projects. We hired GetInData to help us shape the right data environment and train our internal team. The projects included:

—Implementing a machine learning anti-abuse development environment (e.g. anti-spam, anti-phishing, etc.) that allows us to defend against new types of attacks and better protect our marketing and transactional email clients.

—Developing a new invoicing model to consolidate business rules and simplify usage calculation into a single action.

—Enabling streaming analytics-based marketing features for our customers, including deeper live integration with their platforms.

—Building a long-awaited data lake to support ad-hoc advanced analytics, the skills for which we have heavily invested in through training on analytical tools.

What were your goals for this project?

Our overarching goal was to design, build, and optimize a new data platform, then train our team on it and some additional topics related to the final solution. 

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

With an impressive portfolio of projects implementing both open-source platforms and cloud solutions, GetInData had positioned themselves as one of the most experienced Big Data consulting companies. They also had in-depth, hands-on experience with all of the technologies under our consideration. We connected with them through a series of conversations between several of their key leadership and our technical and business stakeholders. 

Describe the project in detail.

The data cluster needed to meet a number of requirements, including: data ingestion via Apache Kafka, our standard publish-subscribe pattern; data analytics using our established tools, such as Apache Spark; analytics streaming with between 2,000 and 3,000 events per second; and an initial capacity of around 200 terabytes scalable for steady future growth.

We began by defining the appropriate requirements and identifying possible solutions, then determining the best avenue of approach. We then designed the new data platform, built the technical specifications, and acquired the necessary equipment before installing and configuring the final product. We concluded with four days dedicated to intensive internal team training.

What was the team composition?

Our system administration and data engineering teams worked with various members from GetInData, who supervised the overall concept and execution. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The new infrastructure now enables the collection of almost 10,000 different events per second with real-time analytics and large-scale batch data processing. We successfully designed and built the platform within our desired timeline, which would not have been possible without GetInData. Working with them cut our installation and configuration time in half and allowed us to address advanced issues related to data security and governance that we couldn’t solve ourselves. They were also instrumental during negotiations with our hardware vendor, reducing costs and ensuring we received the most appropriate products. 

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We essentially merged into one team with GetInData, using Slack and Skype for daily communication. This helped us move through the project as smoothly as possible, even during the most intensive phase.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They offered a tailored approach, extensive experience, and direct, friendly interactions, as well as a professional and dedicated work ethic. Their profound understanding of all aspects of our project amazed me. In addition, not only does GetInData have practical experience with the stack of our choice (Hortonworks’ Apache Hadoop distribution) but they actively participate in the open-source community by sharing their knowledge during conferences and workshops.

Are there any areas for improvement?

There are number of things we could do differently at the moment, but they mostly consist of better preparation on our end. These types of projects are already incredibly sophisticated, but we consolidated nearly all of our sources into one data lake. We could benefit from GetInData's experience by involving them more deeply into our business cases. 

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm Director Professional Services in an IT company. We are located in Switzerland.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire GetInData, and what were your goals?

We have growing up our projects & customers base. We definitely needed to find a good partner to ensure staffing our teams.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We've been working with Getindata in the past already and were always happy with the profiles they've been presenting to us.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Our main activities are around Big Data solutions. We heavily rely on Spark, Hadoop, Kafka, Elasticsearch, etc.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

There were between 2-4 engineers involved in the different projects. They ranged on all seniority levels.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

We were able to deliver projects on time, respecting customer requirements. This would have not been possible without the support provided by Getindata.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Usually we integrate into the team directly. Main communication then relies on Slack.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

We could always rely on their strong commitment to helping us find the right people for the right position.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Keep the good vibe!