“Our challenge was to find a solution that matched the principles our CTO had established for automating our IT environment in a cloud-agnostic, cost-efficient way,” said Ian Edwards, data warehouse technical product owner, MSM. “We quickly realized that Talend, with its cloud capabilities, open source roots, and licensing model, met our needs and could help take our infrastructure to the next level.”
MoneySuperMarket’s mission is to help every household make the most of their money. Through its three leading brands, MoneySuperMarket.com, TravelSupermarket.com and MoneySavingExpert.com, MSM strives to help consumers make prudent financial choices, switch to better-value products, or compare prices on a range of travel options to ensure they have a dream vacation. MSM’s goal is to ensure every customer that visits its site has a seamless, informative, and intuitive experience.
To meet this objective, MSM was looking to drive efficiencies in its ecommerce properties by delivering faster quote times and an improved path to purchase for consumers. Data integration is a critical part of this process as information needs to be combined from a variety of sources and from a range of formats in order to optimize the customer experience. MSM also knew that understanding and improving the consumer experience would help enable the company to drive marketing efficiencies across the organization and create a more personalised and relevant experience for each customer.
MSM Moves to an Automated, Cloud-Based Model with Talend
MSM wanted to move to a cloud infrastructure in order to make its IT environment more agile, so it could rapidly launch new services, enter new markets, scale and fuel company growth.
“We chose to move to a cloud-based model because of the flexibility it provides. It allows us to rapidly spin up and spin down workloads in order to analyze varying volumes of data collected throughout the peaks of daily transactions on our sites,” says Edwards. “A cloud environment also gives us a manageable path forward—whether our IT environment ends up being a hybrid or fully cloud, we will have the capacity needed to grow as a business.”
The company decided to deploy Talend in a hybrid data warehousing architecture on top of AWS. MSM uses open source management tools to install and configure the Talend software on AWS EC2. This architecture allows MSM to easily select the appropriate mix of resources to support the applications needed to aggregate data from different sources and provide consumers with a wide selection of financial, travel and insurance offers.
“MoneySuperMarket is an excellent example of how Talend can help companies take advantage of the full elasticity and cost benefits of Amazon by automatically starting and stopping EMR and Redshift clusters when integration jobs are ready to execute,” said Ciaran Dynes, vice president of products, Talend. “Now, IT departments can better manage the cost of data warehousing jobs while improving productivity and agility.”
