This webinar discussed optimizing large-scale reporting and complex analytics with cloud data warehousing. It highlighted business drivers like improving speed of insights, reducing risk exposure, and increasing user satisfaction that are pushing organizations to modernize their reporting and analytics. Key challenges covered included lack of scalability, slow performance, and managing costs across hybrid multicloud environments. The webinar provided recommendations on prioritizing performance and growth needs as well as adapting to hybrid multicloud. A case study from Zurich North America demonstrated how migrating to Yellowbrick's cloud data warehouse solution improved reporting times and enabled more concurrent queries and users.

1. WEBINAR
Optimize Large-Scale Reporting
and Complex Analytics with
Cloud Data Warehousing

2. Sponsor
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3. DAVID STODDER
Senior Research Director
Business Intelligence
TDWI
dstodder@tdwi.org
@dbstodder

4. Data-Driven Business: Failure Is Not an Option
• More users need the right data at the right time
– Financial services, insurance, and firms in nearly every
industry are ramping up data demands
– Legacy systems hitting capacity and performance limits
• Dependable and scalable performance critical to
business objectives
– Feeding analytics about policies and claims; managing
risk tolerance
– Improving operational efficiency
– Visibility to monitor regulatory compliance
– Data-driven innovation for new revenue streams, new
levels of personalization
Copyright © TDWI

5. Large-Scale Reporting Challenges
• Democratization: Variety of users
– Business users, analytics teams, and data
scientists depend on often hundreds of reports
• Slow performance impacts business
– Hundreds of concurrent reports with end-of-
month spikes; data insights not in time
• Data volume, variety, and distribution
– Datasets bigger, more varied, and draw from
multiple sources, increasingly distributed
• Cloud migration: For growth, reduce costs
– 43%: Expand access with lower investment
– 41% to increase scale and speed
– 38% to unify silos and solve data fragmentation
Source: TDWI Best Practices Report research, Q3 2021
Copyright © TDWI

6. Supporting Increasingly Complex Analytics
• Analytics growth: Modernization driver
– Handling bigger and faster data key to customer
personalization and omnichannel analytics
– Assessing risk tolerance: Support for complex
queries and updating risk models running on big
datasets (100s of terabytes and petabytes)
– AI/ML-infused automation and operational efficiency
• Cloud migration to handle analytics
– 32%: Modernize data integration and management
to create a new foundation for advanced analytics
and AI/ML
– 23%: Align with business needs for short, flexible
analytics development cycles
Source: TDWI Best Practices Report research, Q3 2021
Copyright © TDWI

7. Poll Question #1 [formerly #2]
• What is the biggest business driver behind your organization’s plans to
modernize reporting and analytics?
– Improve speed to insight so we can gain better business outcomes
– Need to reduce risk exposures and comply with regulations more effectively
– Increase satisfaction with risk analytics models
– Increase user satisfaction with reports and interactive access to big data
– Reduce costs and optimize reporting and analytics workloads
– Other (please let us know in the Ask a Question box)
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8. Cloud Challenges in Maximizing Benefits
• Managing costs
– More users, more workloads: 36% have
concerns about data ingestion, egress,
extraction, and migration costs
– 25%: Accessibility and number of users is
constrained due to cost concerns
• Keeping pace with data explosion
– 32%: speed to data insights not fast enough
– The wait for results: Queries taking hours or
cannot be run due to other data workloads
• Hybrid multicloud challenges
– Multicloud strategy to avoid single point of
failure and vendor lock-in; but new silos
Copyright © TDWI

9. Poll Question #2 [formerly #1]
• What is your biggest challenge in optimizing large-scale reporting and
complex analytics with cloud data warehousing?
– Lack of scalability to handle more data, workloads, and users
– Data quality concerns
– Managing and accessing distributed data, e.g., across hybrid multicloud
environment
– Not enough skilled personnel
– Performance is too slow for business-critical analytics
– Forecasting costs and staying on budget
– Other (please let us know in the Ask a Question box)
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10. Realizing the Cloud’s DW Potential
 Set priorities, especially to reduce time to value
– Users need speed and improved query performance for large-
scale reporting and analytics
– Make performance more dependable; anticipate growth in
concurrent users, end-of-month spikes, and more workloads
– Take advantage of cloud elasticity and better price/performance
 Support growth in analytics
– Articulate intended ROI, e.g., more accurate and up-to-date risk
models for customer policies and services
– Analytics key to new data-driven competitive advantages
 Adapt to hybrid multicloud
– Single platforms may not be enough; single point of failure
Copyright © TDWI

11. Thank You
David Stodder
Senior Director of Research for Business Intelligence
TDWI (www.tdwi.org)
dstodder@tdwi.org
@dbstodder

12. Srinivasan Mani
Vice President
Application Portfolio Manager
Zurich North America

13. INTERNAL USE ONLY
Your Data Anywhere
TDWI webinar
August 16, 2022
Srinivasan (Srini) Mani
VP of Data Integration & Delivery
Data Management – Zurich North America

14. INTERNAL USE ONLY
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Zurich North America
• Property, casualty, and life insurance products and services.
• Individuals to small, mid-sized and multinational companies.
Our Challenge
• Synthesizing a massive quantity of analytical data for day-to-day use and company-wide
reporting
• Modernize data warehouse through an extensive review of all major cloud DW platforms
About Zurich North America

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Analytics Challenges
Technical Business
 Data warehouse was slow
 Only allowed for low complexity, short-range,
ad-hoc queries
 Growth in data volume and user base expansion
 Retire/Migrate legacy C++ code to SQL
Optimize actuarial reserving cycle
 Allocate capital reserves to meet policy liabilities
 Use the best estimated loss ratios
Improving month-end financial close cycle
 Efficiency in the P&L reporting process
 Reducing cycle time from 3.5 days to 24 hours
 Data to CFO as early as possible
Reduce operational reporting delays
 Improve availability of data for claims processing

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 Financial and analytical data delivered more rapidly
 Supporting finance, actuaries and other departments
across the organization.
 Financial/ operational/ analytical-related data insights
well ahead of the planned delivery dates
 Drives operational efficiency in various areas.
 C++ solution retired
 IBNR estimates migrated to SQL now 12 hours
compared to 3+ days.
 Price/performance KPI highly improved significantly
due to Yellowbrick adoption.
 Faster Operational reports
 Execution time optimized from 10-15 minutes to
only 1-2 minutes.
Yellowbrick outcome
 Monthly financial close highly optimized
 Reduced by 72%, 86 hours to 24 hours.
 P&L summary to CFO office within an improved
lead time.
 Claims reporting now delivered by 6 AM,
 Claims supervisors able to plan the days efficiently
 Increase in claims productivity
 Zurich found a true partner in Yellowbrick.
Technical Business

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Yellowbrick performance metrics:
Month-end close cycle
23
15
11
19
6 6 6
21.5
14
13
18
6 6 6
13
7 7
8
2 2
3
10
5 4.5
7
2 2 1.5
8.5
5
3.5
6
2 2 1.5
0
5
10
15
20
25
Non-Actuarial
Financial SAP Feed
Actuarial Financial
SAP Feed
AE Pivot Extract Combined Mart Monthly Claims
Mart
Monthly Coverage
Mart
DAC Process
Yellowbrick data delivery performance compared to Netezza
(comparison in hours)
Oct-21 Nov-21 Feb-22
Netezza total run time: 86 hours
Yellowbrick total run time: 24 hours
Upgrade improved run time by 72%
or 2.5 days worth of run time.

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 Provided a low-risk approach to migration through an on-premises staging
platform.
 Facilitated the migration of extensive Informatica investment.
 Complex analytical queries on an 80TB dataset with 100+ concurrent reports
executing simultaneously.
 Exceeded the expectations through reduction in data delivery timelines and
enabled users to run multiple concurrent processes, driving higher efficiency
levels.
Summary of Yellowbrick
Experience

19. INTERNAL USE ONLY
Presentation Title
March 21, 2022
Thank You

20. Mark Cusack
Chief Technical Officer
Yellowbrick

21. Roundtable Discussion
• The journey to cloud data warehousing: Business drivers and migration
experiences
• Solving cloud data warehousing challenges, addressing concerns, and
meeting business objectives
• Dealing with hybrid multicloud and migrating from data silos
Srinivasan Mani
VP/Application Portfolio Manager
Zurich North America
Mark Cusack
Chief Technology Officer
Yellowbrick
David Stodder
Senior Director of Research
TDWI

22. Audience Q&A with Speakers
tdwi.org
Questions?

23. CONTACT INFORMATION
If you have further questions or comments:
David Stodder, TDWI Srinivasan Mani
dstodder@tdwi.org [email]
Mark Cusack, Yellowbrick
[email]@yellowbrick.com
tdwi.org

24. Thank You to Our Webinar Sponsor
24

25. Audience Q&A with Speakers
tdwi.org
Questions?

26. CONTACT INFORMATION
If you have further questions or comments:
David Stodder, TDWI
dstodder@tdwi.org
Mark Cusack, Yellowbrick
mark.cusack@yellowbrick.com
Srinivasan Mani, Zurich North America
srinivasan.mani@zurichna.com
tdwi.org

27. Thank You to Our Sponsors
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