Exporo leaves ELT to Fivetran, invests in a data culture

Seeking scalability for data pipelines

When Gustavo Rada, Head of BI at Exporo, started at the German-based real estate crowdfunding platform three years ago, he was tasked with building out the company’s BI. He brought on Looker to provide analytics and was using open-source APIs to gather data. But as the business grew and the organisation wanted access to additional data sources, understanding and maintaining APIs became difficult and unscalable. “We had one or two people working on pipelines and it was very time-consuming,” Rada explains. “Exporo is very data-driven, people are hungry for the data. We needed a simpler way to get it."

Before bringing on Fivetran, Exporo used a competitor solution together with its internal solution, but Rada found that it fell short:

“Fivetran has much better support, the team is quick to answer and have an active conversation. Solving issues with our previous solution just took too long. The option to set up custom integrations through a Lambda connector is also big for us and the Fivetran Transformations feature has been great for performing data cleansing.”

Saving time while growing data

Fivetran has many pre-built connectors that Exporo needs but for those that are not supported, Rada uses a Function connector. “We use Lamba cloud functions which require some coding but are very standardised. We eliminate the need to maintain the connector and it is less error-prone. Previously there were breakages from time-to-time that the team had to deal with.”

Engineers have regained 50% of their time previously spent on building and maintaining data pipelines and analysts now have more data to work with. For Rada, Fivetran has opened the door to new opportunities:  

“The real benefit of Fivetran is that people can refocus their time and maximise the value of data. We can now build more comprehensive analysis more quickly. Our focus is on data modelling and data analysis versus ETL.”

Empowering teams with BI

Since implementing all components of the modern data stack, Exporo has nearly doubled its number of active Looker users. “Looker helps us grow and sustain our already data-driven organisation. It empowers different teams to answer their own questions. Key stakeholders in different areas of the business are now able to do what people once thought of as the BI team’s work. They are actively trying to answer their questions and build their own dashboards. This frees up a lot of time for the BI team to work on more large-scale and time-intensive projects.”

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Multiple integrations for replicating and centralising data

Fivetran offers integrations for multiple sources including Applications, Databases, Files, Events, Warehouses and Functions. Exporo has implemented many of these to replicate and centralise data from a variety of sources that it can now visualise in Looker, including:

• Asana. Prior to implementing Fivetran, Exporo was using Asana, but didn’t have access to the data. The real estate team was unable to evaluate its processes. Its Asana dashboard now includes a project overview and tagged milestones to see the process of every project and how many tasks are completed or remaining. The dashboard enables Exporo to realise blockers faster, to get an overview of project stage, and to determine whether due dates can be realised. “If the real estate market is moving quickly, we need our internal communications with real estate developers to be efficient and our investment decisions to be informed in order to create more opportunity for the platform. Now we have dashboards monitoring this for more transparency.”
• Salesforce. Exporo now has more rows of Salesforce data. “With our previous solution, certain Salesforce objects were sometimes unavailable. Now we have all of our Salesforce data and the frequency at which it updates is amazing. We have a better understanding of how customer management is doing by visualising their activities and touchpoints with customers.”
• Aurora MySQL. The company has gone from integrating two transactional databases into its warehouse to five because of how easy it is to access them with Fivetran. “When we have to implement new tables or fields there are no issues. Reporting on history is very straightforward. Before Fivetran it was a problem to try and integrate these databases since there was only one person who was able to manage the associated issues. Now people without technical skills are capable of going onto Fivetran and setting up the integration.”
• Webhooks. Exporo didn’t collect event data with its previous solution because it simply didn’t work well. “Now we have five sources which are using webhooks data and the frequency that we get the data is amazing. Integrating other basic things, such as SFTP, is also very easy. When we bring on new applications in the future, I bet they will be covered by Fivetran connectors.”

Whether your sources are scattered across disparate sources, or you’re outgrowing your existing pipeline solution, Fivetran can help. Sign up for a personalised demo or start your free trial today.

About Fivetran: Shaped by the real-world needs of data analysts, Fivetran technology is the smartest, fastest way to replicate your applications, databases, events and files into a high-performance cloud warehouse. Fivetran connectors deploy in minutes, require zero maintenance, and automatically adjust to source changes — so your data team can stop worrying about engineering and focus on driving insights.

About Snowflake: Snowflake is the leading data warehouse built for the cloud. Its unique architecture delivers proven breakthroughs in performance, concurrency and simplicity. For the first time, multiple groups can access petabytes of data at the same time, up to 200 times faster and 10 times less expensive than solutions not built for the cloud. Snowflake is a fully managed service with a pay-as-you-go-model that works on structured and semi-structured data.

About Looker: Looker is a modern platform for data that offers data analytics and business insights to every department at scale, and easily integrates into applications to deliver data directly into the decision-making process.