Vivint is a leading smart home and security provider. The company manages approximately 27 million connected smart home devices across its 1.84 million subscribers, including thermostats, door and window sensors, garage door openers, and door locks.
Vivint’s data team supports the entire business—including marketing and sales, finance and accounting, supply chain and logistics, field operations, and customer support. Snowflake plays a critical role in Vivint’s business operations and reporting. Data from Snowflake powers custom applications for customers, sales representatives, and field technicians. Vivint also uses Snowflake to help ensure data security and compliance throughout the organization.
Vivint migrated its data from SQL Server to Snowflake to increase data capacity and improve performance. Source data had to come into Snowflake from many different systems, some of which were on premises. Snowflake’s Secure Data Sharing made it easy to share data with partners that also had Snowflake. The data team’s members say they can query the data in SQL as soon as it enters the Data Cloud, and get to the answers they need faster than with any other data lake technology they considered using.
To begin the migration process, the data team identified every data process, determined which areas caused the most pain in SQL Server, and migrated them first. They code-named the migration “Operation Snowplow” and dedicated “Snowplow Thursdays” to the effort.
Snowflake provides a number of benefits to Vivint:
Compliance: To comply with ASC 606, an accounting standard that outlines how to recognize contract revenues, the accounting team had to analyze and calculate hundreds of millions of rows of invoice line items monthly. This process used to take more than a day to complete. Now, with Snowflake, it runs in less than three hours.
Customer insights: Vivint’s Subscriber Attrition Model gives the company a snapshot of its customers and their behaviors and attributes. Previously, the company could only run this model monthly and it took over a day to run. Now, with Snowflake, it runs in less than three hours and is run daily to help the company understand its customers’ behavior on a granular level.
Sales and marketing: Vivint migrated its marketing attribution to Snowflake, which allows the marketing team to determine the effectiveness of campaigns. The company used to be able to run this process once or twice a day. Now, it runs every two hours. Vivint is able to capture and store millions of customer marketing interactions that are both online and offline. With this new capability, the data team was able to help the inside sales group grow by 15% year over year.
Cost savings: Snowflake also helps Vivint pay commissions to 10,000-plus sales reps and field service technicians weekly. Previously, Vivint licensed a third-party tool that cost about $500,000 a year for this purpose. Snowflake performs the job faster, and it’s allowed for more flexibility.
Data sharing: Vivint can ingest data from data providers much more easily with Snowflake. Previously, the data team had to rely on the transfer of FTP files, which were hard to ingest and provided inconsistent data. Now, with Snowflake’s Secure Data Sharing, the data shows up quickly and easily in Vivint’s Snowflake account, and the data team can incorporate it seamlessly with their own data.
Application development: Vivint can build scalable applications on top of Snowflake quickly. The data team is working on building a commissions tool that will help sales reps keep track of their sales and stay motivated.
Advanced analytics: Vivint is exploring real-time analytics and data science capabilities in Snowflake that will help with sales and other business areas.
By migrating to Snowflake, Vivint was able to save time and resources on managing data systems, and focus on projects that provide business value for its stakeholders and customers. For more information on Vivint’s migration story, watch our webcast, Let’s Talk Cloud Migrations: Snowflake Customers and Experts Share Strategies for Success When Migrating to the Data Cloud.
Vivint’s Data Environment
– 220 terabytes of storage in Snowflake
– More than 300 users
– More than 100 different data sources
– More than 1 million queries daily
– 300,000 data pipeline jobs daily
– Five to ten CI/CD deployments daily
– 7,500 ETL jobs that run daily to build data store views
