Sierra Circuits provides quick-turn printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing and assembly solutions.

Sierra Circuits runs its manufacturing business on a legacy on-premise relational database architecture, but it has begun creating new custom Cloud-resident applications and using modern SaaS products for critical business processes such as CRM and marketing.

RhinoSource architected and deployed a Snowflake-based data lake where data from Sierra’s legacy SQL Server databases and data from disparate Cloud services are brought together into a single Snowflake analytical environment using Talend Stitch. Sierra uses tools like SQL, Matillion, Tableau and PowerBI to query Snowflake and transform the data to do enterprise BI reporting that provides critical business insights.

RhinoSource also coached Sierra’s executive team on Cloud platforms and SaaS applications and created a Cloud-based custom application architecture for the next generation of Sierra Circuits applications on Amazon Web Service (AWS), including Cassanda NoSQL data storage and customer-facing APIs that provide real-time quotes.

Finally, RhinoSource assisted Sierra with CRM process reengineering and spearheaded the data integration efforts for a new Salesforce.com implementation, as well as designed a Salesforce-centric Net Promoter Score (NPS) process to improve customer loyalty and drive company growth.

Reltio is a cloud-based MDM solution that unifies and cleanses multisource, complex data such as CRM contacts and leads into a single source of trusted information.

Reltio chose DataStax Enterprise Cassandra to house the data lake for its Cloud-native metadata-driven model and operations, due to its high performance columnar storage engine, fault tolerance, linear scalability and built-in multi-datacenter replication capability.

DataStax brought RhinoSource into Reltio to conduct a full review of Reltio’s DataStax Enterprise data lake on Amazon Web Services (AWS), including the Amazon AWS architecture, Cassandra workloads, data model, code, and DataStax cluster maintenance operations.

RhinoSource worked closely with the Reltio DevOps team and assembled the DataStax Enterprise operations runbook to ensure best practices were followed, as well as developed a statistical model that demonstrated that the optimum number of Cassandra vNodes (num_tokens parameter) to maximize cluster availability of large clusters, while still providing some level of load balancing, is in the 2-8 range (DataStax subsequently changed its default to 8).

RhinoSource assisted with load & stress testing to determine the best Cassandra data model design and storage engine configuration and made a number of recommendations to improve performance and reduce the amount of Cassandra data stored and therefore the total number of cluster nodes required, including the recommended use of Solr Search indexes.

Finally, RhinoSource assisted with the redesign of a scalable multi-tenant data model and developed an automated data migration and single-tenant backup/restore process leveraging powerful Spark analytics jobs.

Applied Materials (NASDAQ: AMAT) is a global technology company that supplies equipment, services and software to enable the manufacture of semiconductor chips for electronics, flat panel displays for computers, smartphones and televisions, and solar products.

AMAT needed a high-performance database that could run within globally distributed customer sites and capture IoT data generated by their manufacturing equipment for critical manufacturing process control and analytics, effectively creating a worldwide data lake for customer IoT analytics.

Applied Materials hired RhinoSource to advise executive leadership and their technical team on horizontally-scalable NoSQL data architectures such as DataStax Cassandra, MongoDB and Oracle NoSQL as cost-effective alternatives to traditional monolithic database architectures for their globally distributed IoT data collection systems.

RhinoSource assisted with an evaluation and vendor selection process, which included the DataStax, Oracle and KX KDB+ teams.

Netpulse (now part of EGYM) is a media and data services company focused on delivering dynamic, interactive products and experiences to active lifestyle consumers. Netpulse delivers the leading personal media and workout tracking platform to health and fitness facilities that makes exercising more enjoyable and rewarding.

Netpulse was running their business on Amazon AWS using a hodge-podge of technologies that were not well thought out. Workout data generated on fitness equipment all around the world would transmit back to the company’s application servers on AWS, where mobile app users could interact with it. The system was unstable and not scaling well, so an architectural overhaul was past due.

RhinoSource was brought in by the company’s executive team to review the technical infrastructure and investigate major system performance and stability problems that were frustrating customers.

After a thorough review, RhinoSource implemented transformational best practices for AWS Cloud infrastructure management, resulting in significant improvements in system security, stability, performance and scalability.

RhinoSource then rebuilt the company’s legacy MySQL databases using MariaDB clusters with cached storage, which resulted in an order-of-magnitude improvement in query performance, while also improving security to protect customer PII.

RhinoSource then migrated poorly performing and difficult-to-scale legacy MongoDB document databases to horizontally-scalable and zero-downtime DataStax Enterprise Cassandra/Spark clusters, which were better equipped to handle the growing amount of time-series IoT data being received, allowing the company to better meet its SLAs.

RhinoSource developed Pentaho ETL flows to populate a Zoho Cloud data lake from disparate operational databases and Cloud services and used Zoho Analytics to create marketing and AWS billing and cost analysis dashboards.

The dashboards and reports built to analyze the company’s AWS spending identified areas of waste that resulted in $10,000’s of savings per month.

Geometrics designs and builds innovative and rugged geophysical data acquisition systems for land, marine, and airborne applications.

Geometrics was running legacy CRM, manufacturing and financial applications that required inefficient Excel spreadsheets to track and manage business processes, which made the reporting process slow, cumbersome and inaccurate.

The company was overdue for the implementation of modern CRM and ERP systems, running either on-premise or in the Cloud.

Frustrated by the cumbersome reporting process, RhinoSource was brought in by the company’s executive team to assess current business processes and to review the usage and state of all legacy systems.

RhinoSource documented business processes and suggested near-term improvements.

As the first priority RhinoSource architected an enterprise business analytics strategy and conducted an accelerated Master Data Management initiative using Microsoft SQL Server and SAP Crystal Reports, to help provide more timely and accurate business analytics critical for management decision making.

RhinoSource then briefed the Geometrics executive team on modern Cloud CRM and ERP solutions that would enable near-real-time dashboards, assisted with requirements gathering and helped orchestrate a vendor evaluation process, which included Salesforce, NetSuite, SAP and Microsoft Dynamics.

Geometrics ultimately chose and successfully implemented a Cloud-based CRM/ERP system with BI dashboards customized for their Engineer-to-Order business model.

National Express is a leading transport provider delivering services in the UK, North America, Germany, Spain and Morocco. Every year more than 800 million journeys are made on the company’s buses, trains, light rail services and coaches.

National Express runs its business on Oracle E-Business Suite and needed enhanced P&L analytics for their cost center managers.

RhinoSource designed, developed and deployed an interactive profit & loss financial analytics solution for National Express’s cost center managers using Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE), which was successfully rolled out to 250 cost centers across North America.

RhinoSource also supported ETL development and helped tune long-running ETL steps using Oracle fast-refresh materialized views.

Finally, RhinoSource implemented high-precision performance analytics for National Express’s Oracle databases and ERP applications, assessed current state of the Oracle system architecture and made actionable performance enhancement recommendations.