Seesaw Studying Inc. supplies a number one on-line pupil studying platform utilized by greater than 10 million Ok-12 lecturers, college students and members of the family within the U.S. each month. The San Francisco firm has grown steadily since its founding in 2013, with its hosted service in use in 75% of American colleges and in one other 150 international locations.
After all, when COVID-19 hit in early 2020 and compelled colleges to abruptly swap to full-time distant studying, the necessity for Seesaw’s platform skyrocketed. So did Seesaw’s progress, in response to co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Carl Sjogreen.
“As a consequence of distant studying, most of our key metrics grew by 10X,” Sjogreen mentioned in a video interview with SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE as a part of the AWS Startup Showcase in September 2021.
Wealth of Knowledge, Little Observability
These metrics included the info generated by present and new Seesaw customers as they interacted with the service. Storing all of that knowledge was not an issue. Seesaw was in a position to scale up its essential database, an Amazon DynamoDB cloud-based service optimized for giant datasets. Seesaw’s database holds a number of billions of information.
Nevertheless, making any of that knowledge prepared for analytics, after which sharing these insights in a well timed style, was a special matter. And lecturers and principals had been clamoring for knowledge resembling which college students had been having bother ending classes on time. Whereas Seesaw workers had been begging for inside utility utilization knowledge to enhance the client expertise.
“We had a lot knowledge that any query you requested instantly introduced up 5 others,” Sjogreen mentioned.
In different phrases, Seesaw desperately wanted 360-degree real-time observability of its operations. And that was solely potential if each inside and exterior customers might drill down into the freshest knowledge potential so as to get the solutions they wanted.
Nevertheless, Seesaw’s DynamoDB database saved the info in its personal NoSQL format that made it simple to construct purposes, simply not analytical ones. And the batch-oriented analytical instruments that Seesaw was utilizing, resembling Amazon Athena, had been less than the duty.
“Quite a lot of our knowledge infrastructure was customized constructed and cobbled collectively over time,” Sjogreen mentioned. “We had a really disorganized knowledge infrastructure that, as we’ve grown, was getting in the best way of serving to our gross sales and advertising and marketing and assist and buyer success groups actually service our clients in the best way that we wished to.”
To repair this, Seesaw seemed into constructing a conventional knowledge warehouse paired with a set of ETL pipelines on high of DynamoDB, however concluded that it might take an excessive amount of engineering work and never fulfill its high-performance wants.
“Plug-and-Play” Deployment
Seesaw turned to Rockset, deploying our real-time analytics database in early 2021 on high of DynamoDB. Like DynamoDB, Rockset can ingest, retailer and question large quantities of knowledge. For real-time analytics, the cloud-native Rockset improves upon DynamoDB by with the ability to concurrently ingest large knowledge streams, indexing that knowledge so it’s out there for queries inside two seconds, after which enabling a excessive variety of concurrent SQL queries. Outcomes, even for complicated queries, could be returned in milliseconds.
Rockset works nicely with all kinds of knowledge sources, together with streams from databases and knowledge lakes together with MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Apache Kafka, Amazon S3, GCS (Google Cloud Service), MySQL, and naturally DynamoDB.
“Rockset comes with all batteries included, together with real-time knowledge connectors with Amazon DynamoDB,” mentioned Venkat Venkataramani, Rockset CEO. “You’ll be able to simply level Rockset at any of your Dynamo tables, regardless that it’s a NoSQL retailer, and Rockset will in real-time replicate the info and mechanically convert it into quick SQL tables so that you can do analytics on.”
Consequently, Seesaw was in a position to deploy Rockset very quickly.
“One of many key benefits of Rockset was that it was mainly plug and play for our Dynamo occasion,” Sjogreen mentioned. “We had been ready, inside hours, to begin querying that knowledge in ways in which we hadn’t earlier than.”
Actionable Insights for Educators and Seesaw Staff Alike
As soon as Seesaw started utilizing Rockset to generate analytics and make product utilization knowledge out there via SQL queries, it grew to become more and more difficult to maneuver knowledge out of Rockset and into enterprise programs like Salesforce for his or her gross sales crew to make use of. To work round this drawback, the info crew was pressured to make varied API calls and add CSVs.
This handbook course of was extraordinarily time-consuming, taking two days of developer time simply so as to add a single subject inside Salesforce. Seesaw wanted one thing less complicated in order that their knowledge crew might deal with high-priority duties.
This led Seesaw to Hightouch. Hightouch is a reverse ETL resolution that syncs knowledge from varied knowledge sources to particular goal locations. Utilizing Hightouch to sync the Rockset-powered insights on to Salesforce, Seesaw’s gross sales and advertising and marketing groups can now view product utilization knowledge straight inside Salesforce, enabling them to determine product certified leads (PQLs), customers with low engagement, and potential new clients. As an alternative of taking days to ship knowledge from Rockset to Salesforce, Seesaw now syncs knowledge in minutes.
That is extraordinarily useful to Seesaw. As a product-led-growth firm, Seesaw affords a bottom-up gross sales mannequin the place lecturers can use the service without spending a dime, and can solely method faculty districts when a essential mass of lecturers and college students have adopted the service. Through the use of Rockset to run queries in real-time on their large knowledge shops and Hightouch to sync Rockset analytics knowledge to Salesforce, Seesaw can arm its gross sales representatives with up-to-date insights about how extensively and deeply used Seesaw is particularly inside a district when reaching out to its IT officers.
Rockset and Hightouch additionally work in parallel to assist Seesaw’s product crew slender down the most-needed options. This led to the creation of a pupil progress dashboard. After lower than six months, Seesaw determined to maneuver all of its analytics to Rockset, whereas sustaining DynamoDB as its database of report and utilizing Hightouch to operationalize the info.
- Buyer utilization knowledge is generated in Seesaw and saved in DynamoDB.
- Rockset’s native DynamoDB connector mechanically ingests and indexes all knowledge inside seconds, with out ETL, to allow sub-second SQL queries.
- Question outcomes are pushed seamlessly into Salesforce utilizing Hightouch, a reverse ETL instrument, to arm the gross sales crew with up-to-date insights about their clients.
- Question outcomes are additionally pushed to Retool to assist the product and management groups visualize their analytics.
Seesaw Relies on Rockset and Hightouch To Speed up Progress
As colleges reopen, Rockset serves a key position in offering Seesaw key insights into how educators and college students are dealing with the return to school rooms. Hightouch helps Seesaw’s customer-facing groups leverage this data to extend progress and product adoption.
“The extra we are able to perceive how they [schools] are utilizing Seesaw, the place they’re fighting it as a part of that transition, the extra we generally is a good associate to them and assist them get essentially the most worth out of Seesaw on this new world that we’re dwelling in.”
For Rockset, working with Seesaw has given us useful insights into the best way to enhance our service. Our Position-Based mostly Entry Controls (RBAC) safety function was initially a request by Seesaw.
For Rockset’s CEO Venkataramani, working with Seesaw has had its personal private advantages — bringing him nearer to his two elementary-aged youngsters who’re each customers of Seesaw.
“After I informed them that Seesaw was contemplating utilizing Rocket for analytics, they had been thrilled, they had been overjoyed as a result of lastly they understood what I do for a dwelling,” Venkataramani mentioned. And by working so carefully with Seesaw, “for the primary time I really understood what [my] children do in school.”
That’s observability.
Considering studying extra about this story? Watch the webinar under.
How E-Studying Platform, Seesaw, Scaled 10x Throughout Shutdown with Rockset & Hightouch.
Rockset is the real-time analytics database within the cloud for contemporary knowledge groups. Get sooner analytics on more energizing knowledge, at decrease prices, by exploiting indexing over brute-force scanning.
