How Zeek Focuses on Analytics by Offloading Data Infrastructure

The Company

Zeek was founded in 2013 with the mission to help rescue $100B of store credit lost every year by providing a safe, easy to use and cost effective service. Essentially Zeek is a mobile app and web-based platform that allows users to sell their unwanted vouchers for cash and buy gift cards to leading UK brands at a discount. Zeek built a rapidly growing market for people with an immediate need and are set to expand internationally beyond the UK.

The Challenge

Zeek tried out numerous different out of the box visualization solutions to connect directly to their data sources, but as the company began its exponential growth the need for a single source of truth for their scientists and analysts became apparent. The company soon began visualizing its analytics with Periscope Data, but workaround construction of analytics infrastructure was a long and cumbersome task.

The Solution

Alongside the tasks of building the architecture, Zeek was also faced with critical privacy regulations, having to deal with sensitive customer data. When Zeek moved to Panoply, they transferred all of their data source management, storage, and infrastructure maintenance to Panoply. “The move of most of our data sources was pretty immediate,” says Ziv Isaiah, Zeek’s Co-Founder and CTO.

Our analysts could pretty much immediately begin analysis on a much richer set of data than was previously accessible to us. When we did the initial integration to Panoply, I was surprised by how fast the integration was.

- Ziv Isaiah, Co-Founder and CTO

Zeek uses Panoply to collect and connect various data sources, from Mixpanel to Mandrill to Mailchimp and Zendesk, and string them up together with just a few clicks. The company also uses Panoply’s archiving mechanism built on Amazon S3 to lower storage costs.

The Results

Panoply’s self-optimizing warehouse enables the analytics team and data scientists to actively seek value as schema and query self-evolve towards different data use cases and ever changing analytical use cases.

Automatic data modeling allowed Zeek to send arbitrary data in any standard format, without the overhead of maintaining schemas and altering data types. Panoply's platform collects that data, parses it, and determines the best data model to use. This supports a continuous development cycle, where code and data changes are pushed to production on a daily basis, without requiring any reconfigurations.

By using Panoply, Zeek ultimately was able to save at least 6 months in analytical infrastructure development. However, most important to Zeek is winning back what would have been lost opportunity costs.

With Panoply, my data warehousing problems are outsourced to a professional company, without the need to gain this knowledge in house which allows me to focus on my business.

Panoply gathers all your data in one place and gets you lightning fast analytics.