Cerved Group is one of the largest information providers in Italy. The company evaluates creditworthiness and manages credit risk. In Tableau, Cerved can connect to their existing databases, including Oracle, Teradata, and MySQL. Non-technical business users can easily access data in Tableau Desktop, giving them fast insight into business processes. With Tableau Server, Cerved can share real-time analytics across the business. This centralized data access gives the company a single source of truth—something that Andrea Omodeo, KPI Manager, says is “no trivial matter.”
Tableau: Tell us a little bit about Cerved Group. How does Cerved approach data? Stefano Gatti, Innovation and Data Sources Manager: Our company's mission is, we want to give our customers support tools to make decisions, so our business claim is "to know, in order to decide," and we found in Tableau one of the tools to support this knowledge. Cerved Group, besides being a big data company, is primarily a smart data company. In the sense that we have an important quantity of data, about eight hundred terabytes. Tableau: Why did you consider Tableau? Stefano: We were looking for a tool that would be agile, lean and very easy to introduce in both existing projects and processes and new ones that we were starting, so we tried Tableau.
One of the things that was most important and that helped us with Tableau, was the ease of use and the ease of set up, especially for non-IT people (people that are not developers). It has allowed a sort of democratization of data.
Tableau: Where does Cerved store data? Andrea Omodeo, KPI Manager: We have several database technologies in Cerved, to name the main ones, we have: Oracle, Teradata, MySQL and several other non-relational data sources. We have some supplies that still arrive in TXT format or, in any case, in formats that require attention and need "massaging," so to say, before you can load them and use them; with Tableau, all this has become much easier. Tableau: Why did you choose Tableau over other tools? Andrea: So Tableau was the right solution because it has the possibility to connect in an almost automatic, transparent way to all the databases that we had, and this has allowed me to integrate all of the data sources that I needed. Stefano: One of the things that was most important and that helped us with Tableau, was the ease of use and the ease of set up, especially for non-IT people (people that are not developers). It has allowed a sort of democratization of data. Tableau: How does Cerved benefit from Tableau Server? Stefano: Tableau Server allows us to provide users with a tool for real time metrics and analytics. This means we are not only working on a static photograph, but allows users who need to interact, even several times a day, or several times during the working week, with data that changes, that grows, that decreases, but in any case describes very dynamic phenomena. Andrea: The Tableau Server centralizes data access, so, I can guarantee that all my users see the same version of the data extracted at the same time, it is no trivial matter; before you often had to chase after versions of reports to ensure that everyone saw the same version at the same time.
With Tableau, I have more time to concentrate on the heart of the matter, and the tasks surrounding this are solved practically automatically.
Tableau: What would happen if you didn’t have Tableau? Stefano: Today, living without Tableau in Cerved would be a problem because it would take away all that dynamism, particularly dynamism for innovation in projects underway, which is due to the ease with which the data we see and analyze on Tableau guide us in making certain choices in the project; so, I would prefer a life with Tableau. Andrea: With Tableau, I have more time to concentrate on the heart of the matter, and the tasks surrounding this are solved practically automatically.