Hachette UK selects Automic to automate management of its BI platform

Hachette wanted 'something smarter' to manage its business processes

Publisher Hachette UK has picked Automic's ONE Automation platform to automate management and monitoring of its business intelligence (BI) platform.

Phillip Blanchard, enterprise data architect at Hachette UK, told Computing that the company had been using Windows to manage its BI extract, transform, load (ETL) processes, but that this wasn't as robust as it could have been.

"We could have spent a lot more time building those [processes] out, but even then it is difficult to share that knowledge of those with the rest of the team as the team changes, so we were looking for something smarter than that, something that would manage the process more efficiently and give us the opportunity to expand quicker into new areas as we build new functionality into the system," he said.

The company didn't go through a tender process, but instead came across Automic online. When Automic demonstrated the ONE product to Blanchard and his team, it was "clear that the product did what we wanted it to do".

Blanchard said Automic's software has relieved pressure on his team.

"A lot of our processes were based on Windows batch scripts, and the intelligence in those was quite hard to achieve - so for example, if a process failed it was hard to make a decision on what to do next," he said.

"With Automic, we had the ability to quite quickly move things around in the workflow and realise whether or not we can make benefits from those changes, and move them back quite quickly. It's just as simple as joining two boxes together to change the order in which certain processes operate - something which would have involved a lot of recoding previously," he added.

Prior to using Automic, Blanchard said that BI processing would take about 11 hours to complete. Now it has managed to get that time down to five hours.

"Also failures were occurring too frequently and users were losing faith in the BI platform. Automic is a win for us because we get more intelligent control of the relevant processes. Since implementing Automic, I can't recall the last time that data was not updated in time for the business-critical reports. Confidence in the BI platform has increased dramatically," he said.

Hachette UK purchased 10 days of consultant time on-site when it purchased the product, so that the team could learn how to use the product first-hand.

Blanchard said that there isn't a strategic plan to roll out more Automic functionality yet, but the company is looking at how it could use the product to automate workflows outside of the BI environment. He said that the use of the product is something that will evolve over time.