byrd technologies

Berlin- and Vienna-based byrd technologies handles e-commerce fulfillment, supporting online retailers with an international logistics network that includes warehouse space and parcel shipping services. A lot of data flows through the organization, and it's handled by many different systems. Chief Data Officer Christoph Krofitsch says, "I was looking into ways of consolidating data from third-party SAAS tools we're using in our operations, including Freshdesk, Chargebee, and Close, as well as our own internal data sources.

"We wanted to save as much money as possible, but not implement the pipelines ourselves, as we didn't have the resources. Since we could implement data transformation in Looker, what I was looking for was a low-cost tool that could do the extract and load tasks for us.

"I researched several cloud-based ETL tools. Since low cost and simplicity were the priorities, I chose Stitch."

Krofitsch says, "To get started we connected Stitch to our Amazon Redshift data warehouse and added the integrations we needed, including our own PostgreSQL operational database. I set the sync frequency to every six hours, and together with a little script that does some basic transformations into production-ready data, this setup made the data ready for use with Looker. I've been impressed with the simplicity of setting up integrations in Stitch. The process of testing, integrating, and activating Stitch, including syncing a test database, implementing adaptations of other infrastructure parts, and bringing the setup into production took in total about one week.

"By using Stitch we saved hundreds of developer hours that would have been necessary to implement the data integrations ourselves. Having the data available to us so quickly has an additional positive impact and saves a lot of time. And I appreciate the transparency of seeing the integration health statuses and extraction and loading row counts in the dashboard."

And all of that functionality doesn't cost a lot of money. "Paying just $100 per month for the functionality Stitch offers to us certainly makes me happy," Krofitsch says.