HP democratizes access to AI-driven business insights using Snowflake and ThoughtSpot

Challenge

HP's partner ecosystem generates 80% of its revenue. Its sales process involves data exchanges with thousands of partners for product tracking, sell-through inventory, and more. Evolving business models required more data and data sources to be connected to HP’s data platform.

HP struggled with an ineffective BI toolset for scaling its business and growing its partner ecosystem. The BI team managed a traditional collection of OLAP cubes, a custom-built .NET user interface, and hundreds of offline reports. The system took 24–48 hours to refresh data and even longer to analyze that data. New data deployments took three months, making the data obsolete by the time it was ready for use.

The BI team was a bottleneck, spending too much time on data analysis requests rather than focusing on more-strategic initiatives. The team downloaded data into offline dashboards and reports and distributed it in Excel and PowerPoint documents throughout the organization. End users needed a self-service solution.

Solution

HP selected Snowflake and ThoughtSpot. With ThoughtSpot, anyone can use simple natural language to create new data-driven insights or surface insights generated by others across the entire enterprise. By leveraging AI, ThoughtSpot goes beyond answering known questions, detecting trends, and identifying anomalies and patterns, to suggesting new questions users wouldn’t think to ask.

HP ingests data into Snowflake and then uses Embrace to gain seamless access to that data from ThoughtSpot. According to HP’s VP, Reporting & Analytics, Juergen Kallinger, “Embrace is a game changer. Whatever data my team loads into Snowflake becomes instantly available in ThoughtSpot. In addition, ThoughtSpot has instant access to data in Snowflake Data Marketplace and via private data sharing can access Snowflake data from other HP business units.”

We were on a journey to change the way we approach BI and analytics at HP. We found that our prior back-end platform could no longer keep up with our data consumption. That's when we chose Snowflake. We also needed automated insight discovery, performance at scale, and the ability to adjust as requirements changed. We chose ThoughtSpot and used Embrace to connect it to Snowflake. It’s a perfect combination.

Juergen KallingerVP, Reporting & AnalyticsHP

HP began by ingesting compliance and supplies management data into Snowflake, which became immediately available in ThoughtSpot. This was a massive amount of data, as it tracked toner and ink units sold anywhere in the world. Kallinger put ThoughtSpot to work on this data, taking advantage of its automated insight discovery. Next, the team ingested serial number data, which tracks products in use anywhere in the world. Snowflake and ThoughtSpot are now used for pricing and bid desk analytics, supplies management, partner risk management, customer performance management, and channel performance qand profitability

According to Kallinger, "We've moved from Excel and PowerPoint and now use ThoughtSpot directly as a management tool. We have our business analysts and market and country management teams using ThoughtSpot to do analysis and fuel business management reviews."

Results

Speed, flexibility, and self-service for internal end users. Gone are slow reports and bottlenecks for analytics requests. HP’s users now have access to a self-service analytics platform that’s fast and flexible and provides automated insights discovery. So far, 350 users have been onboarded, and several thousand more will be added in a few months. Over a six-month period, 155,000 queries were generated. According to Kallinger, "Business groups are using ThoughtSpot in business reviews and no longer question whether a file has been updated or the data is reliable.”

It’s fantastic to see the evolution. My team is out of the dashboarding business. We focus on ensuring high quality data is available for users whenever they need it, but we leave the visualization and analysis to them.

Juergen KallingerVP, Reporting & AnalyticsHP

HP partners have also benefited. "With Snowflake, we accelerated the way we refresh and process data. We now tell partners they have more time to submit their data," Kallinger says. Partners now submit data by the end of their business day and obtain data back from HP the following day. The result is time savings and a more efficient process for HP’s partners.

What's next

Democratized data access for the entire organization While HP will soon scale data access to thousands of users, Kallinger would like to eventually democratize data access for everyone. Kallinger says, "We’re significantly reducing the legacy tools we have, including offline reports and offline dashboards. We're also reducing our overall expense in the BI and reporting space. Channel data is fundamental to our business and we're excited to make it available to anyone in the organization who needs it."