How Vindi created and managed a data lake

The challenge

Vindi was struggling with the flow of customer data. CEO and founder Rodrigo Dantas’s solution to this issue was to create a data lake – something he recommends for all companies dealing with large amounts of customer data. So what is a data lake and how does it work?

The concept of the data lake was originated by James Dixon, then chief technology officer at Pentaho. He says that most companies work from what are called “data marts”: subsets of both structured and unstructured data, usually generated by a single tool or team. Think of a spreadsheet of sales leads generated by your prospecting team. You may have a name, a position, a company, an assigned score, a phone number, an email address and more.

The difference between a mart and a lake is best thought of as follows: the datamart as a store of bottled water – cleansed and packaged and structured for easy consumption – the data lake is a large body of water in a more natural state. The contents of the data lake stream in from a source to fill the lake and various users of the lake can come to examine, dive in, or take samples.

The solution

Before they could jump any deeper into the lake, the team at Vindi needed to adopt a sales CRM to help them automate and streamline a bunch of repetitive, time-consuming administrative workflows. That’s when they found Pipedrive.

Rodrigo knew that he faced a challenge integrating Pipedrive into an already complex data lake, but he also knew that the success of his company’s sales efforts rested on meeting this challenge head-on.

To do this, Vindi upgraded to a new Pipedrive plan and started diving into the easy-to-use API.