Solve the puzzle: A company’s critical customer data is in a multiterabyte on-premises database, and the digital marketing application that uses that data to manage and execute campaigns runs in the cloud. How can the cloud-based marketing software quickly access and leverage that on-premises data?
It’s a puzzle that one small consumer-engagement consulting company, Embel Assist, found its clients facing, and one that the team felt needed a better answer.
The traditional solution, perhaps, would be to periodically replicate the on-premises database in the cloud using extract-transfer-load (ETL) software, but that may take too much time and bandwidth, especially when processing terabytes of data. What’s more, the replicated data could quickly become out of date.
Using cloud-based development and computing resources, Embel Assist found another way to crack this problem, creating an app called EALink that acts as a smart interface between an organization’s customer data sources and Oracle Eloqua, a cloud-based marketing automation platform. EALink also shows how development using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure creates new opportunities for a small and creative company to take on big enterprise data challenges.
Say the on-premises CRM system for a drugstore chain has 1 million customer records, and the chain wants an e-mail campaign to reach customers who made their last purchase more than a month ago, who live within 20 miles of one set of stores, and who purchased products related to a specific condition. Instead of exporting the entire database into Eloqua, EALink runs the record-extraction query on the CRM system and sends Eloqua only the minimum information needed to execute the campaign. And, the query is run when the campaign is being executed, so the campaign information won’t be out of date.
Embel Assist created EALink in 2018 in response to one client’s need, says Ryan Vaske, CEO and managing partner at the company: “They had a multiterabyte customer database and were using ETL processes and another on-premises marketing solution to upload data into Eloqua, in order to design campaigns, send out emails, or send out SMS text messages.”
The solution was EALink, which would replace the ETL-based data replication and other data loading tools with an integrated software application that runs in the cloud to let marketers choose whatever fields they need without moving huge amounts of data, says Vaske. EALink can connect Eloqua to more than 150 different data source types, including relational databases, data warehouses, data lakes, and other applications, including CRM and ERP, both on-premises and in the cloud.
EALink was built using Oracle SOA Suite, a set of components for developing and running service-oriented architecture applications. The EALink application itself runs as a multitenant application on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Another benefit of EALink, Vaske says, is that marketers can select and use data sources without help from their company’s IT staff, who traditionally manage complex ETL software.
The future? Embel Assist is a small company with big plans that include adding support for additional external data sources, and for other cloud-based marketing-automation platforms.
“We’ll keep EALink itself running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure,” said Vaske. “The more clients we have, the more servers and the more infrastructure we’re going to need to support them, and that will increase our footprint on OCI.”
