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Seesaw Studying Inc. supplies a number one on-line scholar studying platform utilized by greater than 10 million Okay-12 lecturers, college students and members of the family within the U.S. each month. The San Francisco firm has grown steadily since its founding in 2013, with its hosted service in use in 75% of American faculties and in one other 150 nations.
After all, when COVID-19 hit in early 2020 and compelled faculties to abruptly swap to full-time distant studying, the necessity for Seesaw’s platform skyrocketed. So did Seesaw’s progress, in response to co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Carl Sjogreen.
“As a consequence of distant studying, most of our key metrics grew by 10X,” Sjogreen mentioned in a video interview with SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE as a part of the AWS Startup Showcase in September 2021.
Wealth of Information, Little Observability
These metrics included the information generated by current and new Seesaw customers as they interacted with the service. Storing all of that knowledge was not an issue. Seesaw was in a position to scale up its important database, an Amazon DynamoDB cloud-based service optimized for big datasets. Seesaw’s database holds a number of billions of information.
Nevertheless, making any of that knowledge prepared for analytics, after which sharing these insights in a well timed trend, was a special matter. And lecturers and principals had been clamoring for knowledge resembling which college students had been having bother ending classes on time. Whereas Seesaw workers had been begging for inside software utilization knowledge to enhance the shopper expertise.
“We had a lot knowledge that any query you requested instantly introduced up 5 others,” Sjogreen mentioned.
In different phrases, Seesaw desperately wanted 360-degree real-time observability of its operations. And that was solely potential if each inside and exterior customers might drill down into the freshest knowledge potential with a purpose to get the solutions they wanted.
Nevertheless, Seesaw’s DynamoDB database saved the information in its personal NoSQL format that made it straightforward to construct purposes, simply not analytical ones. And the batch-oriented analytical instruments that Seesaw was utilizing, resembling Amazon Athena, had been less than the duty.
“Loads of our knowledge infrastructure was customized constructed and cobbled collectively through the years,” Sjogreen mentioned. “We had a really disorganized knowledge infrastructure that, as we’ve grown, was getting in the best way of serving to our gross sales and advertising and marketing and assist and buyer success groups actually service our prospects in the best way that we wished to.”
To repair this, Seesaw regarded into constructing a conventional knowledge warehouse paired with a set of ETL pipelines on high of DynamoDB, however concluded that it might take an excessive amount of engineering work and never fulfill its high-performance wants.
“Plug-and-Play” Deployment
Seesaw turned to Rockset, deploying our real-time analytics database in early 2021 on high of DynamoDB. Like DynamoDB, Rockset can ingest, retailer and question huge quantities of information. For real-time analytics, the cloud-native Rockset improves upon DynamoDB by having the ability to concurrently ingest huge knowledge streams, indexing that knowledge so it’s accessible for queries inside two seconds, after which enabling a excessive variety of concurrent SQL queries. Outcomes, even for complicated queries, could be returned in milliseconds.
Rockset works effectively with all kinds of information sources, together with streams from databases and knowledge lakes together with MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Apache Kafka, Amazon S3, GCS (Google Cloud Service), MySQL, and naturally DynamoDB.
“Rockset comes with all batteries included, together with real-time knowledge connectors with Amazon DynamoDB,” mentioned Venkat Venkataramani, Rockset CEO. “You may simply level Rockset at any of your Dynamo tables, although it’s a NoSQL retailer, and Rockset will in real-time replicate the information and routinely convert it into quick SQL tables so that you can do analytics on.”
Consequently, Seesaw was in a position to deploy Rockset very quickly.
“One of many key benefits of Rockset was that it was mainly plug and play for our Dynamo occasion,” Sjogreen mentioned. “We had been ready, inside hours, to start out querying that knowledge in ways in which we hadn’t earlier than.”
Actionable Insights for Educators and Seesaw Staff Alike
As soon as Seesaw started utilizing Rockset to generate analytics and make product utilization knowledge accessible by way of SQL queries, it turned more and more difficult to maneuver knowledge out of Rockset and into enterprise methods like Salesforce for his or her gross sales workforce to make use of. To work round this downside, the information workforce was pressured to make numerous API calls and add CSVs.
This handbook course of was extraordinarily time-consuming, taking two days of developer time simply so as to add a single area inside Salesforce. Seesaw wanted one thing easier in order that their knowledge workforce might concentrate on high-priority duties.
This led Seesaw to Hightouch. Hightouch is a reverse ETL resolution that syncs knowledge from numerous knowledge sources to particular goal locations. Utilizing Hightouch to sync the Rockset-powered insights on to Salesforce, Seesaw’s gross sales and advertising and marketing groups can now view product utilization knowledge straight inside Salesforce, enabling them to establish product certified leads (PQLs), customers with low engagement, and potential new prospects. As an alternative of taking days to ship knowledge from Rockset to Salesforce, Seesaw now syncs knowledge in minutes.
That is extraordinarily priceless to Seesaw. As a product-led-growth firm, Seesaw presents a bottom-up gross sales mannequin the place lecturers can use the service at no cost, and can solely method college districts when a vital mass of lecturers and college students have adopted the service. By utilizing Rockset to run queries in real-time on their huge knowledge shops and Hightouch to sync Rockset analytics knowledge to Salesforce, Seesaw can arm its gross sales representatives with up-to-date insights about how extensively and deeply used Seesaw is particularly inside a district when reaching out to its IT officers.
Rockset and Hightouch additionally work in parallel to assist Seesaw’s product workforce slim down the most-needed options. This led to the creation of a scholar progress dashboard. After lower than six months, Seesaw determined to maneuver all of its analytics to Rockset, whereas sustaining DynamoDB as its database of document and utilizing Hightouch to operationalize the information.
- Buyer utilization knowledge is generated in Seesaw and saved in DynamoDB.
- Rockset’s native DynamoDB connector routinely ingests and indexes all knowledge inside seconds, with out ETL, to allow sub-second SQL queries.
- Question outcomes are pushed seamlessly into Salesforce utilizing Hightouch, a reverse ETL instrument, to arm the gross sales workforce with up-to-date insights about their prospects.
- Question outcomes are additionally pushed to Retool to assist the product and management groups visualize their analytics.
Seesaw Is dependent upon Rockset and Hightouch To Speed up Development
As faculties reopen, Rockset serves a key position in offering Seesaw key insights into how educators and college students are dealing with the return to lecture rooms. Hightouch helps Seesaw’s customer-facing groups leverage this data to extend progress and product adoption.
“The extra we will perceive how they [schools] are utilizing Seesaw, the place they’re fighting it as a part of that transition, the extra we generally is a good accomplice to them and assist them get probably the most worth out of Seesaw on this new world that we’re residing in.”
For Rockset, working with Seesaw has given us priceless insights into the right way to enhance our service. Our Function-Primarily based Entry Controls (RBAC) safety function was initially a request by Seesaw.
For Rockset’s CEO Venkataramani, working with Seesaw has had its personal private advantages — bringing him nearer to his two elementary-aged youngsters who’re each customers of Seesaw.
“After I informed them that Seesaw was contemplating utilizing Rocket for analytics, they had been thrilled, they had been overjoyed as a result of lastly they understood what I do for a residing,” Venkataramani mentioned. And by working so intently with Seesaw, “for the primary time I truly understood what [my] youngsters do at college.”
That’s observability.
Fascinated with studying extra about this story? Watch the webinar beneath.
How E-Studying Platform, Seesaw, Scaled 10x Throughout Shutdown with Rockset & Hightouch.
Rockset is the real-time analytics database within the cloud for contemporary knowledge groups. Get quicker analytics on more energizing knowledge, at decrease prices, by exploiting indexing over brute-force scanning.
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