ACCELERATING DATA-DRIVEN ECOMMERCE WITH SNOWFLAKE

COMPANY Westwing

LOCATION Munich, Germany

INDUSTRY Ecommerce

EMPLOYEES 1,100+

GOALS Enhance business intelligence by scaling data analytics

WEBSITE westwing.com

Limitless, elastic data storage and decoupled, instantly scalable compute make Snowflake an impressive solution for any data-driven organization.”

ADAM MASCHEK, CTO at Westwing

Westwing Group AG is an ecommerce company that serves 900,000 customers in 11 European countries. Westwing’s “curated shoppable magazine” delivers inspiring home and living products to customers, most of whom interact with the company’s website and mobile apps 100 or more times per year. With data guiding almost every decision, Westwing collects and analyzes large amounts of customer interaction and operational data.

THE CHALLENGE: Overcoming roadblocks to scalable analytics

Seeking to scale an already democratized ecosystem that provided employees unfettered access to data, Westwing’s data team began evaluating its existing infrastructure.

Westwing’s on-premises environment could not affordably scale beyond 12.5 terabytes of storage and required countless hours of data archiving. Clusters were frequently overloaded by peak-time querying, reporting, and scheduled tasks, leading to unreliable performance and prolonged delays for business intelligence users.

Monitoring servers, patching operating systems, and performing backups consumed significant resources and diverted attention from data exploration and analysis. “Version upgrades became too risky, and upscaling our database cluster presented a greater cost than benefit,” Westwing’s CTO, Adam Maschek, said.

THE SOLUTION: A cloud-built data warehouse designed for scalability

Realizing the need for a data warehouse built for the cloud, the data team turned to Snowflake.

Snowflake’s multi-cluster, shared data architecture offered the most scalable solution for increasing analytics at Westwing. “Snowflake’s strongest differentiator is its ability to scale almost instantly to handle any amount of data and workloads,” Maschek said.

S N OW F L A K E B E N E F I T S

• Limitless and elastic data storage

• Decoupled, instantly scalable compute with per-second pricing

• Near-zero management infrastructure

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY

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ABOUT SNOWFLAKE

Thousands of customers deploy the Snowflake Cloud Data Platform to derive all the insights from all their data by all their business users. Snowflake equips organizations with a single, integrated platform that offers the only data warehouse built for

any cloud; instant, secure, and governed access to their entire network of data; and a core architecture to enable many other types of data workloads, such as developing modern data applications.

Find out more at snowflake.com

Snowflake’s data warehouse-as-a-service model eliminates time-consuming administrative tasks, such as cluster tuning and maintenance. Snowflake's Time Travel and Zero-Copy Cloning features accelerate data exploration while mitigating risk and storage costs. Performing all of Westwing’s data transformations in Snowflake with pure SQL reduces data pipeline complexity.

Snowkflake’s per-second pricing promotes transparency and provides scalable compute for a fraction of the cost.

THE RESULT: Scalability for a fraction of the effort

Migrating Westwing’s use cases to Snowflake has been a painless process that requires zero involvement from system administrators and keeps data engineers focused on architecture and development.

Business intelligence dashboards, powered by Snowflake, deliver on-demand insights to end users without resource contention or downtime—even during peak workload times.

Simplified data extraction and transformation with Snowflake yields a more scalable data pipeline. “Snowflake connects to Amazon S3 and performs semi-structured data manipulations without third-party data processing tools, which enables larger data loads for a net savings,” Maschek said.

Transparent, pay-per-second pricing maximizes efficiency and promotes an outcome-driven approach to data analytics.

THE FUTURE: Expanding data’s impact

Maximizing Snowflake’s impact is a top priority for Westwing’s data team. “Migrating all of our use cases to Snowflake will allow us to experience significant operational and business benefits,” Maschek said.

Integrating additional data sources is also on the roadmap. “Our plan is to increase the amount of data available and promote easier access to that data,” Maschek said.

WHY SNOWFLAKE

Separate storage and compute eliminate resource contention and delays

Connection to Amazon S3 simplifies data transformations and loading

Cloud-built architecture scales instantly and infinitely

Per-second pricing promotes transparency and reduces infrastructure costs

Near-zero management infrastructure reduces system administration

Native SQL support accelerates development and reduces data pipeline complexity

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY