Sun Microsystems is a Fortune 500 company that develops and provides a diversity of software, systems, services and microelectronics that power everything from consumer electronics to the world’s most powerful datacenters. Its network computing platforms are used by nearly every sector of society and industry and are the backbones of some of the world’s best known search, social networking, entertainment, financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, news, energy and engineering companies. With over 33,000 employees worldwide, Sun is a leader and visionary in its fields of expertise.
With over 800 disparate legacy applications, Sun tackled a large-scale master data management (MDM) project to consolidate the customer data held in those applications to a unified customer data hub (CDH). The ultimate goal was to have a single source of truth that would enable a 360° view of the customer.
To meet the goal of one true view of the customer, several challenges needed to be overcome. At the outset, the most critical was to apply a common structure to each of the numerous data systems as they were combined. As these systems were brought together, Sun discovered the presence of duplicate data – a result of both the integration process and also previous data that was already repeated in the systems.
Not surprisingly, since duplicated data already existed within each of the systems, it became magnified and overexposed because the newly centralized data was available to a much larger audience. To solve this challenge, Sun turned to DataFlux.
Sun chose DataFlux to perform data quality tasks, such as data profiling, metadata analysis and data de-duplication. DataFlux offers a unique set of workflow tools built on an industry-leading technology platform that encompasses every facet of the data management process. Through its intuitive interface, DataFlux technology provided Sun’s business users with powerful data improvement capabilities and complete control over data quality and data governance initiatives, while allowing the IT team to visualize the data improvements as they happened.
The DataFlux technology was also used to discover exactly what data problems existed in Sun’s new unified customer data repository and used the pre-built scorecards to gauge the health and integrity of its data after the data cleansing was completed and new data entered the system.
Sun uses the automation functionality in the DataFlux technology to gain an accurate customer view. “DataFlux technology has allowed us to automate several tasks within our complex process,” said Dalton Cervo, customer data quality lead at Sun Microsystems. “It has given us the ability to quickly and accurately execute what would otherwise be very time-consuming and labor-intensive steps. DataFlux is a critical piece in making this process scalable and repeatable.”
Sun now uses DataFlux technology to assist its data analysts to understand and make decisions based on the trusted and accurate information that now resides within its data store. Analysts are able to:
“Without DataFlux, it would have been impossible to quickly produce the required results,” Cervo said. “With a few data analysts and the DataFlux technology, we can process dozens of company data sets in a single day. Otherwise, we would spend days analyzing a single company.”