Daniel Heacock, Senior Business Systems Analyst at Etix and Adam Haines, Data Architect for Federated Sample, discussed their experience as Attunity customers with theCUBE host Jeff Kelly, live at AWS re:Invent 2013.

Etix provides “a software solution that enables venue owners to engage customers and sell tickets’ Heacock explained.

Federated Sample is a technology company in the market research industry that adds “an exchange layer between buyers and sellers.” Haines added that it facilitates transactions between buyers and takes over price negotiation.

“The show has been great so far,” Haines said. “We were originally on premise entirely, it didn’t meet our rapid growth, We need something more elastic, more agile, so we ended up moving our entire infrastructure to AWS,” he explained their relationship with Amazon.

Asked to comment on their experience with Attunity, Haines said they “started with a home-grown solution to move our data from our production SQL server into Redshift.  Attunity provided a nearly real-time solution, “the reports that we were running on our other systems were taking ten times longer.”

“Redshift is enabling us in a lot of ways,” Heacock added. Performance is a definite advantage, as it “basically enabled us to develop products that would not been possible otherwise. The ability to crunch data in a specific time frame is very important.”

Commenting on data sources moving from transactional systems to Redshift, Heacock said “we are in the business of helping our customers sell tick, we try to find ways to improve their marketing efforts.” Marketing segmentation is critical and easy to do in Redshift.

Asked about the use analytics, Haines explained “what we ultimately capture is answers to questions. We try to find value in a certain type of answers,” leveraging business and analyses on information to help customers.

Commenting on BI tools adoption and usage over AWS, Heacock said Jaspersoft and any BI tool in the Amazon platform has “the ability to launch it almost immediately and be able to play with data within 5-10 minutes. The options, plug and play workloads are pretty amazing, giving us the flexibility in our organization to temporarily use a tool. We are confident that product will be there whenever the need is there.”

Asked about the privacy and data ownership concerns when using AWS, Haines explained “we’ve isolated a lot of our data in virtual private clouds. With that segment of the network we feel more comfortable about putting our data in the public space.”

Heacock  said privacy was definitely a technology question to a certain extent. As a transactional business, security is a concern. “That was the first issue that we addressed. AWS has taken all of the precautions, we have a similar setup.”

Commenting on the future use of cloud and analytics, Heacock said they focused on  bringing “data from all of the sources we have together,” with Salesforce, MailChimp, their digital marketing agency data being tied in “Atuinity has been a great help there. We’re confident that the demand is there and the product will develop as we move forward.”

Haines explained their current challenges relate to distribution, being agile, elasticity. “Our data growth is rather large each month, we are focusing on scalability.”

Asked to share a piece of advice to practitioners, Heacock urged them, “don’t try to do it yourself when the experts can do it for you.” Haines added that initially he was apprehensive about Redshift, but “you can do so much with it now at half the cost.”