Analysis Services Tabular can be used in large-scale solutions and SQLBI already helped several companies in the challenging effort of defining a reliable and scalable architecture, designing the right data model and optimizing the queries. One of these stories is now a case study published as a Microsoft White Paper.
InContact Ltd. is a U.S. company based in Utah that provides a pay-as-you-go cloud service aimed at managing all aspects of a contact center. Their solutions are end-to-end, from data collection to analytical reports on contact center activity. Their customer base is worldwide and thus requires:
- Data centers on multiple continents and time zones.
- A multi-tenant architecture that can stretch with a growing customer base.
- Strict service level agreement (SLA) requirements that assure customers of a fast response when viewing reports about their own call center operations.
Since 2011, inContact’s customer base has doubled year over year, placing a commensurate demand on the infrastructure (both software and hardware) required to support the added volume. BI reporting workloads are an integral component of any inContact solution. In fact, their services include several analytical tools and reports that provide customer-specific insights into the contact center performance.
By 2012, the company was losing confidence in the third-party reporting product they had previously integrated into their solution. As the customer base grew, inadequate performance and a high total cost of ownership prompted inContact to evaluate alternative reporting solutions, even if it meant a change in the underlying technology and a major redesign of the data warehouse.
Ultimately, inContact chose SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS). This whitepaper provides a detailed description of their experience in moving their BI reporting solution to an SSAS Tabular implementation.
In this paper, we will explain how we navigated through multiple challenges before arriving at a successful outcome. For anyone who is evaluating Tabular models, we hope this paper can shed some light into the investigation and proof-of-concept testing required before going into production with this specific technology.
Download Paper (docx)