Caserta

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work at an academic cancer center. I’m the vice president, chief data officer, and associate director for data science.

What challenges were you trying to address with Caserta?

We had an enterprise-wide data warehouse that organized our structured data. However, as we looked to work with some of our more unstructured data, including images and text, we realized we needed to employ more advanced technologies. We hired Caserta to develop our requirements and design the architecture for a cloud-based data integration and analysis platform.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The platform is a centralized repository for all patient data, including electronic medical records, billing data, and data we’re collecting specifically for research purposes. It also enables us to share data with external partners in a HIPAA compliant way. 

They’re using ETL and Snoflake via AWS. 

What is the team composition?

I interacted with different people through the phases of the engagement, including business analysts and data engineers. I was in contact with Joe (CEO) throughout the whole process. 

How did you come to work with Caserta?

I came across them at a chief data and analytics office exchange in Chicago. Since this was a cross-industry event, I thought it would be a good opportunity to explore different data organization approaches used outside the healthcare industry. There were several data analytics companies at the conference, including Caserta. 

How much have you invested in them?

We spent between $1 million–$1.5 million.  

What is the status of this engagement?

The engagement started in late-2018, we moved into the implementation of the actual design in late-spring of 2020. 

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

 They successfully delivered on the requirements we set forth. We’re continuing to add data to the platform ourselves. Metrics of success will be defined around users of the platform and increased efficiency. 

How did Caserta perform from a project management standpoint?

They do well in terms of communication. We had weekly meetings. Project management was sometimes a challenge because we had to start and stop the project multiple times. That wasn’t their fault, though. In general, they do well with the agile approach and can deliver their work on time. They were responsive to feedback and accommodated their approach to project management to fit our needs. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re creative and listen to the requirements of the customer. I felt like they were looking to design a solution that met our unique requirements. It felt like a true partnership. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

I feel like they could be a bit more specific when sharing their project management plans and schedule. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the vice president of Enterprise Data - AARP. We’re a nonprofit association that advocates for Americans over the age of 50 for social impact issues and causes that make aging and living a better place in America.

What challenge were you trying to address with Caserta?

We hired Caserta to build our first environment database. The goal is to bring all our digital data — web, email, online clicks, and page view data —  in one place. This is so that we could mine the data, gain insight, and offer a better experience for our members.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They built the platform on AWS cloud and developed the infrastructure. The team helped us pick the right software tools and management system. They also delivered that solution to our own software team which allowed us to manage it on our own now.

What is the team composition?

Throughout the course of the engagement, we worked with around 6–10 people. I interacted the most with the account executives but the actual team had architects, developers, and a project manager. My team and I worked with them on a daily basis to deliver this project.

How much have you invested with them?

The project cost us roughly $1 million

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked on the project from around October 2016–August 2017 — the project took less than a year.

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

The quality of their services was excellent. They proved that they were one of the main innovators in the project. They were great at building solutions that would’ve cost us more if we worked with another agency. Their service was fantastic and groundbreaking for us. 

How did Caserta perform from a project management standpoint?

They did an excellent job meeting the scheduled deadline. Since this is the first time we worked on this type of project, there were a lot of unknown things for us and their expertise helped guide us through the process. The project ended on time and within budget, so it was great.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their knowledge and innovation in the project extremely impressed us. They were easy to get along with and were always available to answer anything we needed. Their high level of support for our project gave me confidence when I reported to my executives. They were open to deliver a high-level program was my favorite part of the engagement.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Since this project is extremely technical, we encountered bumps trying to figure out the business-value driven solution. That was early on the project and the team eventually understood this and recognized that issue. They then brought additional resources that helped frame this. The problems we had with them were quickly reconciled and were brought back on track.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Our advice is to be clear and upfront with your business value. This will make a great difference in the results when you communicate that with the Caserta team.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CIO at the Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions. We’re also known as CRICO.

What challenge were you trying to address with Caserta?

Our mission is to protect our providers through malpractice insurance and deliver analytics for patient safety. We’ve been doing analytics for a long time, and our environment was growing old. Caserta was brought onto the team to create a reference architecture as well as a short, medium, and long-term plan to address the cost and skillsets required to deliver.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The key deliverables over our eight-week timeframe were to create a Cloud Native analytics reference architecture. Then, they were responsible for recrafting our current analytics data into the new reference architecture. We wanted a plan for creating the architecture and them moving our existing process into the new Cloud Native environment. Within the plan, they showed us what tasks could be done in the immediate term and short-term. 

What is the team composition?

They’re a small organization, and we were able to work with Joe (President), who wrote the book on the field of data warehousing. This is truly their space of expertise. Additionally, we worked with 4–5 others to deliver the solution. That involved a solutions architect, a project manager, and a business-oriented architect. 

How did you come to work with Caserta?

Joe is the guru in this space. I attended a conference and heard a presentation that he gave about creating future architecture with current business capabilities. It was very compelling, so we connected.  

How much have you invested with them?

Including travel expenses, we spent $258,000 on the engagement. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in September 2019. Everything was complete, vetted, and presented by November of that year.

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

They delivered on time, on budget, and opened their plan for execution. Peers and others in my network praised the plan, saying that it would be exactly the right architecture to fit our needs. It was clearly a strong deliverable.  

How did Caserta perform from a project management standpoint?

They were very easy to deal with. We never had to go back and forth about change requests. If a problem arose, they simply took care of it. It was fortunate that we had a strong project manager on our side. Their project manager was taking care of personal issues during our project, and others were happy to step in to make sure things were delivered on time. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their solution architects are exceptionally knowledgeable about this space. They made a commitment and did whatever it took to deliver on their promises. Their work ethic and deep knowledge of data warehousing really stood out. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

There was a bit of a gap in project management. I’d encourage them to focus a bit more heavily there.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Their solutions architect was fantastic, easy to work with, and great at explaining new technology to the business. I was very pleased with them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the senior VP of enterprise applications and recording of an interactive entertainment company. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Caserta?

We wanted to upgrade our technology solutions to support a new analytics function that was being developed internally.  

What was the scope of their involvement?

We were evaluating what technology, visualization, and reporting tools would be appropriate in supporting analytic capability. Our team ended up choosing Snowflake as the database to support our analytics needs. 

The solution needed to allow analytics teams to tap into the data that was stored in our existing Oracle database in a Snowflake environment. Secondly, they were responsible for moving our pipelines to directly connect with the Snowflake database.  

What is the team composition?

There were three people there overall, a solution architect and two developers. 

How did you come to work with Caserta?

We found them through a recommendation from our analytics head.  

How much have you invested with them?

We spent about 500,000–$1,000,000 over the course of that year. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from around February 2019–2020.

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

We were successful in giving the analytics team an environment in which they could do their work without any significant bottlenecks. When they receive requests, they can fulfill them pretty quickly.  

How did Caserta perform from a project management standpoint?

They met deadlines and highlighted potential risks before diving into a new task. That allowed them to remove blockades before we reached them. They were able to be flexible and agile with requests coming in at the same time. We communicated with them through phone meetings, Slack, and email, but they regularly worked on-site over the course of the project. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They were accommodating in adjusting their priorities as necessary. There were a few times that we ran into situations that we didn’t foresee. They were great at helping us react to unforeseen circumstances.

We appreciated their diligence in exceeding our timeline expectations, foreseeing potential issues and turning around tasks quickly. That really kept everything on track.  

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Have a plan to manage the scope of the project with them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Our company is a software provider for the auto industry. Primarily, our customers are dealerships. My role is program manager with our products and technology organizations. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Caserta?

We engaged them to help us with data architecture to better leverage and monetize the data we were collecting as we worked to build out a new data platform for internal use and data analytics for customers.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We contracted them to assist us with reviewing and designing the architecture, making recommendations as they saw necessary. Additionally, we were considering engaging them on additional pieces of functionality to deploy in a limited fashion. It was intended that the scope of that project would evolve as they completed the assessment of our environment. 

We ended up collaborating in the master data management space for consumers, customers of dealers, and end buyers. They built an economic model and some infrastructure for that system. They assessed the platform and made recommendations on how to improve our data governance as well. They overview governance very broadly across the organization to assess and recommend solutions across the data management space. 

They ended up building out a playbook to guide our company in the implementation process of that governance as well. We asked for recommendations on the best technologies to use for our purposes, and they recommended Snowflake. While we pivoted quickly to focus on our consumer canonical model, they helped build out a modern tech stack to help us centralize consumer data. That was built in Python, uses Elasticsearch, and was deployed using AWS.

What is the team composition?

There were five people appointed to the project. 

How did you come to work with Caserta?

I found them via web search while searching for potential partners for this project.

What is the status of this engagement?

We collaborated between April–July 2020.

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

We’re now working to take their proof of concept forward toward new production and infrastructures to provide data services to the application. Their work was fundamental in our ability to move that project forward. The quality was great for the time that they had. The governance playbook set up the guidelines for me to build out the governance functioning for our organization. 

We’ll continue to leverage the materials they put together to support our implementations. It’s imperative to safeguard our data as well as maximize its value, so we appreciate their guidance on data governance. 

How did Caserta perform from a project management standpoint?

They were professional in their high-touch communications with me. Everything was managed quite well, but we had trouble pivoting when we realized that our organization’s SOW didn’t reflect exactly what we needed. It would’ve been helpful if they were a bit more assertive with their recommendations and forthcoming with insights. They may have fallen short in representing the progress of the project in that way. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their ability to execute and leverage their talented resources was impressive. They thoroughly thought through the business side of their contributions, which helped us from a legal standpoint. It was clear that they were thought leaders in their technical field. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

It would be great if they could bring more visibility to the pieces they’re delivering. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

We had a broad statement of work and struggled with that broadness. Make sure you’re being specific about your goals for engaging them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CIO at a long/short equity hedge fund. I manage all of the software dev and data analytics.

What challenge were you trying to address with Caserta?

We’d built a robust traditional hedge fund software platform and wanted to get involved in big data and alternative data analysis. We didn’t want to use a traditional relational database; we wanted a cloud-based approach but didn’t have the in-house expertise to build it ourselves.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We talked to Caserta about our goals, and they did a week-long dive into our data lake. We went through potential use cases, and they helped design and architect the data lake, using AWS. We also discussed using different processing layers and scheduling orchestration tools, giving us a comprehensive platform blueprint. We considered using a pre-made data lake platform, but they weren’t flexible enough, and Caserta came up with an excellent outline.

Once we agreed on a proposed blueprint, Caserta provided a few consultants to work with our in-house team to build the infrastructure and write the code. They helped train our team members to get them up to speed on our project. After that, we began to generate our first set of analyses for our portfolio managers.

As we worked on the project, Caserta suggested we use Databricks as our Spark layer to process the larger datasets. We wanted to be able to scale, so they recommended elastic computing to easily control the cluster of Spark machines. We also use AWS Redshift, and our processing generates parquet files that are stored on Amazon S3. We use MicroStrategy to manage our internal components, and Caserta uses Tableau for interactive visuals that the analysts and portfolio managers want. They also recommended Airflow as our orchestration server for the cloud.

What is the team composition?

They provide two expert resources in Python and data analytics and bring in different experts, depending on the phase of the project. We also interact with Joe (Founder, Caserta).

How did you come to work with Caserta?

Joe was the keynote speaker at a conference a while back, and he had a great approach to handling alternative data. He knew how to approach larger datasets and build data lakes, so we got in contact and eventually hired them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $700,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We partnered in November 2017, and the work is ongoing.

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

We planned on only working together for six months, but the project went so well and we had so much work coming in that we’ve extended the partnership. Our investment analysts are happy with the work, and the platform has changed how our investment team processes and analyzes data. This has now become a competitive space, and Caserta helped us get to market much faster than if we’d done this by ourselves.

How did Caserta perform from a project management standpoint?

A few of the consultants work on site with our team, so we haven’t had any problems communicating with them. We have a weekly call with Joe and regular check-ins. We meet in person every few months to discuss trends, progress, and any issues. They’re always accessible, and I’m happy with our relationship.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Lots of people understand big data tools, but Caserta has the ability to both architect and execute an effective solution. Not every team can do both tasks well. They came up with a great plan and efficiently executed it, building a functional and effective product.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They should widen their areas of expertise. Right now, AWS is their strongest skillset, but they should focus on other platforms, like Google Cloud.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Have well-defined goals and know what your objectives are. Caserta’s a great team; you just need to point them in the right direction.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the head of engineering at a boutique fitness chain. I'm responsible for all the technology platforms we use to acquire customers, introduce them to the studio, and maintain relationships with them. We also have platforms for managing our e-commerce and POS processes.

What challenge were you trying to address with Caserta?

We use a lot of data to make decisions and offer different features to our clients. We were looking for a company to help us review our legacy infrastructure as it relates to data warehouse and our entire data ecosystem.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Caserta helped us architect a roadmap as well as implement the first pass at our data ecosystem. We needed someone that would do more than just execute our requests. They spent a lot of time ramping up and understanding not just the data but how our company plans to leverage that data. They also provided recommendations on where we can leverage the data.

Their biggest role was coming in, speaking to different departments that work with the data, understanding our needs, and doing the analysis. We broke our project into two phases. During the first phase, they put together a formal statement of work on what they thought we needed. During the second phase, their engineers and architects helped us with the implementation and architecting the system on GCP (Google Cloud Platform). They also helped us understand which technologies we should use and how much budget we need during the implementation phase and post-launch.

We interact with our customers in the omni channel format–not just across technologies, but through offline touch points, whether it's kiosk machines, check-ins, or apps. Caserta made sure we understood the framework that we put together for ingesting data and that we could continue to be self-sufficient and add new sources of revenue after our relationship with them ended. Finally, they assisted with writing the code for Spark and Python as well as testing.

What is the team composition?

We worked with a project manager, a lead architect, a part-time architect, and about three engineers.

How did you come to work with them?

I talked to their past clients about the technologies they use and the problems they can solve. I liked their references, so I decided they'd be a good fit.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in April 2018 and the relationship is ongoing.

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

We're now able to look at data across multiple sources. We also have the ability to generate reports quickly and get access to the data we didn't have before, which reduces the time it takes us to manage some processes. Since many things now take minutes rather than days, we can spend more time analyzing the data, which helps us make better decisions on either a future project or an ongoing project. That's where we're getting the biggest return on investment.  

How did they perform from a project management standpoint?

They did a good job. We had an internal team that was interfacing with their team, which helped us understand where the project is (they work remotely). We had to go back and request more formal documentation and transition plan from them, but they were able to provide everything we had requested.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They're very knowledgeable and experienced. They've worked on very large datasets across many different industries, solving similar problems. Also, everyone in the company, including their CEO, was very hands-on. They wanted to make sure the project is successful and maintain positive relationship with us.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The project management could be a little tighter in terms of managing our expectations, but overall they met all of our needs and stayed within the budget estimations.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

If you're investing in a similar product, you also need to invest in the internal resources so that you can manage the system after it's released. Otherwise, you'll need to have a long-term relationship with Caserta, which might be costly.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CIO of a group of fitness brands that’s also looking to expand into the hospitality industry.

What challenge were you trying to address with Caserta?

We were working with a partner that had a next-generation data warehouse in place and we were re-platforming onto an SQL and Teradata platform. About a year into initiative though, we realized we were going the wrong direction. We needed someone to help us re-think, re-architect, and completely re-platform us into AWS Redshift.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They moved us from our existing platform into an AWS Redshift setup which helped us get up and running. They also helped us from a development operations point of view by developing the right practices and processes for iterative, ongoing development. We’d been used to a Waterfall methodology, so our warehouse would only be updated a few times a year; this was a big event.

What is the team composition?

There was project manager, and at the peak, they had five or six engineers working in parallel with our internal team.

How did you come to work with Caserta?

We’d worked with the founder of the firm when he was at another company. After he left, we stayed in touch, and then we heard that he’d started Caserta.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent over $1,000,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from Dec. 2015–Dec. 2016.

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

It’s the cost savings, first and foremost. We were on an expensive, on-premise piece of data infrastructure with high licensing when they transitioned us to a cloud-based system. They implemented the right processes and pieces of technology to allow us to be much more iterative and nimble in how we release changes and add enhancements. Ultimately, we’re far more responsive to our business needs and have better methods. Now, a new analysis, report, or data source only takes days or a week to get plugged in, instead of several months.

How did Caserta perform from a project management standpoint?

They were tightly integrated with our team and were on-site a good amount of the time, which was really important. We had regular status calls the check in, and both sides raised issues immediately if they found them. We had some issues and setbacks—like any complex project does—but there was no material or budgetary overage or timeline slippage.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The quality of their talent is definitely their differentiator. They're not a big shop, but they’re a lean, tight shop. Every engineer that we interacted with was impressive.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I know they’re more of a niche player, but they’d benefit from diversifying their skill set—expanding to other database platforms and technologies. It would allow them to become more of a one stop shop for clients versus a specialty outfit.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of Värde Partners, an alternative asset manager that focuses primarily on distressed credit investing.

What challenge were you trying to address with Caserta?

We wanted a vendor with deep technical expertise and experience in the financial services industry.

What was the scope of their involvement?

In December 2017, we brought them in to do assess our current data architecture solutions. Caserta then recommended a new technology platform and a year-long roadmap for its development. Then, in February 2018, we hired Caserta to execute the proposed roadmap. To build the platform, the team set up an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud structure, ran proofs of concept with a couple products, and used that information to drive selection and data modeling. Finally, Caserta did the Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) work to pull data out of our transactional systems and into the warehouse.

What is the team composition?

They had a three-person team including two data engineers. The project manager also served as the senior technical architect. We worked with a business analyst at first, but later decided to fill that role in-house.

How did you come to work with Caserta?

They had partnered with some of my colleagues in the industry. I reached out because I knew they had considerable technical experience.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent close to $500,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in December 2017 and the relationship is ongoing.

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

Caserta has enabled our technical capabilities to grow, which sets us up for future success. Our platform can now handle structured and unstructured data. Likewise, the AWS infrastructure is rock solid. We also have a good set of tools in production for our first-version warehouse. In addition, we anticipate the new platform will be more cost-effective than its predecessor.

How did Caserta perform from a project management standpoint?

The team is a great partner because they’re organized and communicate their progress along the way. We haven’t invested too much time on this aspect because Caserta is readily transparent. Initially, the project was equal parts off site and on site, but we’ve progressed to mostly remote collaboration.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Caserta’s considerable experience manifests itself in quick and effective approaches. Their analyses are focused and yield helpful recommendations in a very short amount of time. Second, the team’s technical and engineering skills are wide-ranging. Caserta can navigate a variety of technologies quickly with active input from senior leadership. Their guidance and advice are valuable.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They need to manage their egos. The flipside of being really smart is being too stubborn. The team can nitpick small points, which creates friction and wastes time.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of IT for a resort group. We own and operate a number of ski resorts around North America. I’m responsible for some of the technologies we use on-property for fulfilling guest experience, as well as putting together data to better understand that experience.

What challenge were you trying to address with Caserta?

We have a number of legacy data systems across all our resorts, so we needed a lightweight, low-overhead mechanism to reduce some of those inherent complexities. We were also going through some business transformations and were looking for ways to advance our technology. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

We started by trying to get all of our data into one place for further analysis, and then we continued to refine our scope. We're now using Caserta to help us build a cloud-based infrastructure, using an infrastructure as code baseline. They’re working on the extract and load applications to move data from the source systems into this cloud environment. They’re also building out some of the capabilities of normalizing that data. Our primary data sources are SQL servers, since we've got a lot of Microsoft in our world, but we also have some PostgreSQL and Salesforce data that we need to combine.

They’ve also been providing strategic, architecture guidance on how we should be looking forward, both in terms of technology, as well as our roadmap. Like with Big Data, there’s a lot of hype and buzz around it, but what we’re doing at the moment isn’t related to big data, so we don’t want to overhype it and not have it deliver value to the business.

What is the team composition?

We work with a senior technical architect, who’s our primary knowledge expert and mentor, but we also have another senior data engineer.

How did you come to work with Caserta?

Our CIO had a previous engagement with them, so he brought them in for a conversation. We’d been looking at a couple of other options, but we liked the way they talked about our approach to this project. They also wanted to frame the engagement as a technology learning experience, so we could understand things more fully before spending sums of money, time, and effort committing ourselves to a particular path.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent between $300,000–$500,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We've been working together since May 2017.

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

It's pretty early to have good metrics, but we've gone through some data validations, and we’ve found a very high degree of accuracy. Because of the engagement we have - the resourcers are in our office – we’ve been able to execute very quickly. We’re really looking forward to operationalizing some of the data to grow and advance the business.

How did Caserta perform from a project management standpoint?

We have our own project manager, but the two people they embedded with us are really focused on documentation. We’ve worked with them to ensure that we could own this internally, that it wouldn’t just be in a black box that we couldn’t understand. We’ve focused on having a high degree of communication and collaboration, and they’ve achieved that quite well.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The general level of technical knowledge and experience is very high. They also have a strong willingness to understand what we're looking for, what we need, and what our business is. Then they do their best to help us with that.

They’ve also provided us a great deal of strategic guidance, as to how to best size the engagement, and where we focus our energies. This way, we're learning as much as possible and not committing to particular technologies or patterns without proper understanding.

Any advice for potential customers?

Be upfront about what you're really looking for, how you want to structure the project, and what your goals are. Caserta does a really good job of tailoring the project and working well with the customers. They’re good at adapting to the project as it changes, but doing so effectively requires a great deal of transparency and collaboration.