Before we were cross-referencing multiple databases, building massive spreadsheets, which was very manual and tedious. Splunk put all of that information into a visual format that’s usable, empowering us to make better decisions. Previously, what had taken us days, we’re now able to do in hours, if not minutes.
SONIFI Solutions, Inc. Creates Seamless Reporting, Saves Thousands of Dollars Annually
SONIFI Solutions, Inc. is a technology integrator that services the hospitality and healthcare industries, offering interactive television, OTT (over-the-top) streaming and internet services to more than one million hotel rooms and 500 million people annually.
Previously, manual and tedious processes made it difficult to make data-informed decisions, and SONIFI sought a new solution. Since deploying Splunk Enterprise and taking advantage of new features, including metrics and event annotation, SONIFI has seen benefits including:
- Saving $85,000 per year by centralizing reports and implementing more efficient processes
- Reducing reporting time from days to minutes
- Answering customer questions about five times faster
Challenges
- Difficult to make sense of the vast amount of data to make business decisions
- Customers’ deadlines and expectations required quick answers to questions
- Data spread across multiple sources
Business Impact
- Saving $85,000 annually by centralizing reporting and streamlining processes
- Saving $100,000 per month by correlating viewing habits with billing data and detecting questionable cancellations
- Reducing reporting time from days to minutes
- Answering questions in real time
- Gaining insight into how hotel guests use products
Why Splunk
“Data is important to SONIFI. We gather insights about how guests and patients are using our system,” explains Kara Heermans, VP of product management and user experience at SONIFI. “We then use the insights from this data to make better decisions about our products, and to provide information to our hotel or hospital partners about how to adjust the system to serve their customers’ needs better.”
Previously, with large volumes of data in multiple places, SONIFI struggled to quickly access and understand its data. Additionally, SONIFI spent weeks to generate reports, with significant amounts of time dedicated to developing tables to first structure the raw data, and then to test and report on this data. With Splunk Enterprise, the team can now ingest this same data raw — no tables or structure required. This ability cuts data query time from one day to one hour. This time savings enables engineers to detect bugs and generate accurate reports faster.
Clara Merriman, a business intelligence engineer, knew Splunk was the right solution after seeing a demo with SONIFI data. “We noticed an error in our own data during this demo, which was exciting because we obviously didn’t know we had a problem until we saw it done in Splunk,” recalls Merriman. Since then, SONIFI has adopted Splunk Enterprise as its primary reporting solution.
“Before we were cross-referencing multiple databases, building massive spreadsheets, which was very manual and tedious. Splunk put all of that information into a visual format that’s usable, empowering us to make better decisions,” says Heermans. “Previously, what had taken us days, we’re now able to do in hours, if not minutes.”
