Case Study Category

• Public sector
• Intelligence Community

Customer Benefits

• Fast loading accelerates migration
• Open-standards database provides a seamless transition
• Compact footprint decreases costs, increases agility
• Analytics-optimized architecture delivers fast, high-quality insight
• Billions-row geographic information process slashed from 60 minutes to milliseconds

“One of the things that interests me most about Yellowbrick is that fact that you get the kind of performance you do out of such a small footprint. A lot of the competitors are offering solutions that are racks, and that does not work for our customer.”

Jed Elliott, Senior Software Engineer, Clarity Innovations

Clarity Innovations provides analytic software the US Intelligence Community (IC) uses to support missions to keep the nation safe. Wes Daniels, Clarity Innovation’s COO notes: “In a business sense, time is money, but in a DoD sense sometimes time is lives. Having the ability to load data faster, and query data faster is very important in our line of work.”

As customer datasets grew to petabytes, Clarity Innovations found that its traditional disk-based solution could no longer return data as fast as its customers required. Daniels said: “90% of all the data produced, has been produced in the last two years, so architecture from 10 years ago are just not going to be able to keep up with it.” Enter Yellowbrick Data.

Fast loading capabilities and open-standards database deliver a seamless transition

Traditional solutions might require days or weeks to load data. Yellowbrick Data loaded data much faster, enabling Clarity Innovations to keep their focus on business. Daniels told us: “From the time that we had access to Yellowbrick, we were able to jump right in. We were able to load billions of rows in minutes.”

Software Engineer, Bob Calder also noted how easy the database was to implement, saying Yellowbrick was “a far cry from databases I’ve had to configure in the past, where you can measure the work in hours, compared to minutes that it took with the Yellowbrick solution.”

Compact footprint helps keep costs in check

Jed Elliott, Senior Software Engineer, Clarity Innovations noted the benefits of the Yellowbrick compact footprint, stating: “One of the things that interests me most about Yellowbrick is that fact that you get the kind of performance you do out of such a small footprint. A lot of the competitors are offering solutions that are racks, and that does not work for our customer.”

“We were asked to pull back geographic information from billions of rows of data. It was taking almost 60 minutes to cull through the data with our existing system, whereas data results came back in milliseconds in the Yellowbrick solution.“

Bob Calder, Software Engineer, Clarity Innovations

Delivering fast results that matter

The phenomenal performance Yellowbrick delivers enables Clarity Innovations to more effectively meet customer needs. Calder told us of one real-world scenario: “We were asked to pull back geographic information from billions of rows of data. It was taking almost 60 minutes to cull through the data with our existing system, whereas data results came back in milliseconds in the Yellowbrick solution. “

Elliott also observed how its SQL-standard architecture helps to deliver real insight: “Yellowbrick is doing something that a lot of the performance-based data store solutions are not, and that’s keeping relationships embedded from the ground up. Sometimes it’s the relationship that matters more than the data itself. Yellowbrick has that baked in. Instead of having to worry about replicating [data] in twenty different tables, flattened out five different ways to answer the same question, you can just run in Yellowbrick with one simple join.”

Clarity Innovations is delighted with the Yellowbrick solution, as it helps them deliver faster, higher quality insights to its customer, without racks of hardware, and without a complex migration.