Learn how Planetly relies on Keboola throughout its data operations to help empower its green mission.
Planetly uses technology to simplify carbon management for companies at scale.
Their data-driven software solution helps companies reach net-zero emission targets in four steps:
The entire carbon management life cycle is powered and fueled by data.
We talked to Cari Davidson, VP of Engineering and Patricia Montag, the Engineering Lead Analytics, to better understand what role Keboola (and data as a whole) play in the company’s operations and what that means for the engineering team.
When Cari took over Planetly’s DataOps, the datascape consisted of an operational PostgreSQL database with materialized views for analytics.
As Cari explained,
"We were in the process of implementing Looker, which doesn't work well when data is in different locations, in different formats. We have a very small data analytics team and I had the vision of having a tool that allowed us to manage our ETL pipelines and data warehousing, without the need for us to set up a lot of platforms that the team would need to maintain. Keboola met that need, allowing us to do this in a way that fits with our ways of working."
That is where Keboola stepped in. A couple of months later, Planetly could rely on Keboola throughout its data operations to help empower its green mission.
At the beginning of their journey, Planetly’s data ecosystem required a lot of time-consuming maintenance.
To add new data, data ingestion pipelines had to be built with manual code requiring backend engineering to supply the Postgres database with additional data. Analytics and data validation were often done by exporting data to Excel files and constructing ad-hoc reports.
The problem with such a setup? It didn’t scale with Planetly’s growth, slowing down the team and their customers on the journey towards net-zero carbon emissions.
As Patricia noted,
“We wanted to build a data product that would enable customers to act quickly and allow us to build better solutions faster.”
Cari and her team shifted their focus from maintaining an existing data stack to changing it into a more flexible, resilient, and scalable data platform.
They introduced Keboola as the centerpiece of their data architecture for all the data pipelines and flows, extracting data from multiple sources and integrating it into Snowflake as their data warehouse and Looker as their BI tool.
Primarily, Keboola allowed Patricia and her team to move faster. In just over 5 months, they constructed a full end-to-end self-serving analytic platform with a small team of 6 selected data operatives. Secondarily, Keboola was cheaper when it comes to the total cost of ownership.
As Cari put it,
“We went from having data spread all over the place, to having our data pulled into our data warehouse, within a couple of months.”
So why Keboola and not any other tool? Why not just code all the pipelines manually?
Cari has evaluated other tools like Prefect and Homegrown, according to her, they landed on Keboola because:
“It was a complete solution. Prefect was a bit more challenging, and we needed to manage our coding flows a lot more intensely, which this team wasn't prepared to do. Keboola was easier for us to implement quickly. We were able to get our ETL pipelines up and running within days, without a lot of fuss.”
Keboola helped build a fully-integrated analytics platform that delivered four business outcomes.
With the vast collection of ready-to-use connectors, Keboola helps extract data from multiple sources but also loads it to multiple destinations, like Snowflake (data warehouse) and Looker (business intelligence).
This simplified the building up of an analytic infrastructure. This infrastructure and tooling allow Patricia and her teams to keep an eye on the company’s performance and quantify the business processes surrounding it.
Patricia and her team provide and help integrate the data they analyze back to their clients. Planetly’s clients can now more easily identify carbon management causes and opportunities for improvement.
Before Keboola, internal data quality assurance was done manually by various departments. For example, client data was exported to Excel files, to validate its correctness and completeness.
With Keboola Planetly were able to build tools that automate data validation. By automatically checking for errors and reporting quality assurance metrics in dashboards, Patricia and her team empower their coworkers to do their jobs more effectively and with fewer manual errors.
Planetly is a leader in the carbon management vertical, but competition is growing. By building their carbon management solution with data, they continuously enrich, develop, and add new data-driven features that push their product beyond its competition.
Here are the 6 things Patricia and her team love about using Keboola:
These and other features allow Patricia and her team to deliver use cases efficiently while building more resilient data products at scale.
According to Patricia, without Keboola they wouldn’t just need more people to do the same workload, they would also need different engineering profiles, ranging from DevOps to Cloud and Backend Engineers.
“It would definitely take much longer to cover all the processes without Keboola.”
Instead, Patricia and her team of data engineers and analysts can build and scale data products that empower coworkers and delight customers on the journey towards a greener future.
Keboola is the data stack as a service platform that helps you integrate all your data tools and centralize operations.
Read more about how Keboola’s clients simplified and scaled their data operations or get in touch with us to learn how you can achieve remarkable results for your business too.
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