Simply Business selects Microsoft's BI platform over Oracle to gain better customer insight

Oracle 'wouldn't give the same rigour, reliability and agility as Microsoft SQL Server 2012', claims company chief operating officer

Online business insurance broker Simply Business has selected Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Enterprise to replace Oracle Transactions to enable it to better respond to customer insight by analysing metrics and interactions from its website.

Simply Business insures more than 225,000 property owners, shops, and small and medium-sized businesses throughout the UK, but two years ago it lacked a focused business intelligence strategy, according to the company's chief operating officer, Chris Slater.

"We did our data exploration two years ago through a very traditional Oracle Transactions database and Microsoft Excel for pre-aggregated reports," he told Computing.

"If we had a business problem or challenge that any of our units wanted to test, there would be a bespoke request that would come into quite a small team, and those requests would then be serviced by us trying to grab that data and manipulate it through the Oracle database and send the report out. In the broadest sense, we didn't have a strategy around data at all," he said.

Previously, an analyst would scrutinise the request and upload the query to the Oracle database. An Oracle SQL developer would then retrieve the data through the query, collect the result, copy it into an Excel template and distribute the data back to the business owner.

But Slater explained that for a firm of Simply Business's size, this method was unsustainable for growth.

"We wanted to have data that was re-usable, robust, structured, and that would enable us to get insight out into the business. From a technology perspective this would have to be agile as, for example, we wanted to build products and launch them within weeks rather than months, and as the data models change significantly, we needed a solution and a warehouse that provided resilience, re-usability and a capability to scale," he said.

The insurer needed to deliver analyses, reports and statistics quickly and frequently to its developers, and wanted a system that would make it easy to integrate structured and semi-structured data for its business users.

Microsoft's stack, comprising SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), was selected, partly because it was in Gartner's upper quartile of BI products, but also because of the robustness it displayed on trial, said Slater.

"We brought in [consultancy firm] Adatis and engaged with them as specialists in that field, so they did the prototype for us. We could see benefits for us going forwards with what Microsoft was planning to release, and so after the pilot exercise and proof of concept, we rolled it out," he said.

Slater said that the insurer gave other products a "cursory glance" rather than going through a full tender process, but that alternatives from companies such as Oracle wouldn't give the firm the same capability.

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Simply Business selects Microsoft's BI platform over Oracle to gain better customer insight

Oracle 'wouldn't give the same rigour, reliability and agility as Microsoft SQL Server 2012', claims company chief operating officer

He explained that the firm did not have a data solution that was reliable and that, at the time, multiple versions of the truth were being created

"There were elements we needed out of an app, that married both rigour and reliability with some form of agile approach to data generation, and we looked at alternatives like the Oracle app but it just wouldn't give us that capability," he said.

The fact that Simply Business had previously been using Microsoft Excel also played a part in the decision.

"[Excel] played a part in our decision. We worked with Adatis to understand what our end estate needed to look like. As we've got a very data hungry and capable organisation we needed to make sure we could share insights using tools familiar to end users as opposed to [tools familiar to] developers. Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel enabled us to do this," he said.

"We needed to make sure of compatibility with those tools that end users could use, and so part of the selection process was about making sure that we had an ability to publish through Excel and allow manipulation and PowerPivots through SQL servers," Slater said.

Challenges and benefits

It took three months for Simply Business to move from the pilot stage to implementation, and it encountered several challenges along the way.

The first challenge, Slater said, was trying to retain a sense of "business as asual" while it invested in its BI capabilities.

"It's a fine balance between keeping the wheels moving while investing in this platform - in an ideal world you go away and build a platform. We needed to keep our business moving so there was a little bit of tension there with a fixed resource; we continued to deliver information but not as much as before while we were building warehouses," he explained.

There were also more technical challenges.

"Translating what was a black box Oracle database with rules written into that, into a platform that exposed the definitions is beneficial, but when your dataset is relatively complex, then you need to make sure you provide some rigour behind it," Slater said.

A third challenge was ensuring that there was sufficient training in order to realise the benefits of the platform.

"We got a group of ‘power users' and made sure they were engaged with the rollout as we started to release features and dimensions and then those master users became [experts]. It probably took six months for them to be able to answer questions from users on the platform," he said.

Microsoft's BI platform has helped Simply Business to reduce its development life cycle and increase its speed to market, claimed Slater.

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Simply Business selects Microsoft's BI platform over Oracle to gain better customer insight

Oracle 'wouldn't give the same rigour, reliability and agility as Microsoft SQL Server 2012', claims company chief operating officer

He added that the use of relational modelling tool SSAS Tabular enabled the company to address the significant challenge insurance companies face in building complex data warehouses, and that self-service BI has enabled it to expand into new markets more quickly, remain competitive, and attract new customers.

"We can get on with producing better products rather than spending time extracting data, as we did with our previous system. With the additional benefit of ease of administration through Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, productivity in our developer team has increased significantly since September 2012," he said.

This is because the developers put best practices and general information about their work and projects onto SharePoint documents, enabling the developers to have all of the knowledge in one accessible place.

The future

As part of its BI stack, Simply Business has become an early adopter of Microsoft Powermaps, a geo-mapping tool that is also part of Microsoft's 2013 suite. The latest version, said Slater, will help unlock more opportunities for the company.

"Having now wrapped all functionality through [self-service BI tool] Power BI and improved data exploration through [Excel add-on] Powerquery, this is going to further unlock opportunities for us to up-skill the entire organisation in its use of data."