A global leader in retail technology solutions, trusted by some of the world’s top retailers, had a mission: to keep pace with the ever-demanding expectations of connected, modern consumers.
But as innovation raced ahead, cracks began to show. Disconnected systems, legacy infrastructure, and reporting bottlenecks started to slow things down. They were known for powering unified commerce experiences, but behind the scenes, their data was anything but unified.
What once felt cutting-edge was now holding them back. The dream of real-time, data-driven engagement was slipping out of reach.
The organization needed a data solution that could match its bold vision: fast, scalable, and capable of delivering real-time insights to drive smarter decisions and elevate the user experience.
The need for a unified data strategy became clear and fast.
The goal was bold yet simple: build a modern analytics platform capable of real-time insights, unified workflows, and lightning-fast scalability.
To bring that vision to life, BlueCloud leveraged two cutting-edge technologies: Snowflake and Coalesce.
In just three months, the client unlocked dramatic improvements:
- Faster insights with streamlined reporting and visualizations
- Scalable analytics that support modern workloads
- Stronger trust from internal teams and retail partners
The Challenge: Modernizing Legacy Data for Real-Time Insights
As the unified commerce provider expanded, their legacy data warehouse began to reveal its limits. Real-time insights were delayed, which meant opportunities to act on live customer data were slipping through the cracks.
Disconnected back-end systems made it difficult to deliver meaningful analytics—both internally and to retail partners.
Imagine a day in their world:
- A store manager waiting hours for daily transaction reports.
- A marketing team unable to launch personalized campaigns because behavioral data wasn’t syncing fast enough.
- A customer service team lacking visibility into live purchase data when a customer called for help.
The result? Missed opportunities, delayed decisions, and a growing divide between business potential and data reality.
As one leader at the client put it:
“With so many varied products across multiple databases and teams that behave independently, we wanted to seal it over, so our customers don't notice. Because they will notice when your company behaves like six companies instead of one.”
The organization needed a modern data solution that could:
- Ingest data in real time to keep analytics fresh and relevant
- Unify analytics workflows across different business units
- Scale rapidly without compromising performance
- Empower teams to turn data into action—without heavy developer involvement
The Solution: Building a Future-Ready Data Foundation for Personalized Customer Experience
Working closely with the organization’s data teams, BlueCloud architected a modern analytics platform built on Snowflake, the cloud data powerhouse designed for scalability, flexibility, and zero infrastructure management.
But Snowflake alone wasn’t the full story. The real magic came when Coalesce joined the picture.
With Coalesce’s powerful ELT automation capabilities, BlueCloud accelerated data modeling, transformation, and integration, reducing manual development and ensuring data was clean, reliable, and always up to date.
Using Coalesce’s visual, metadata-driven framework, the team standardized complex point-of-sale, inventory, and customer interaction logic into reusable patterns. Instead of hand-coding every pipeline, they defined governed, repeatable models with built-in documentation and lineage—making it faster and safer to deliver new reports, dashboards, and partner views as needs evolved
After conducting a deep analysis of all reporting from their modern point-of-sale systems, the team prioritized the most commonly used and high-impact data sets for migration first. This strategic sequencing brought immediate business value while reducing complexity.
As the client explained:
“We did a deep analysis of all the reporting from our point-of-sale systems. We prioritized what was most used, what had the most impact, and started there. Our goal was to empower business analysts to handle visualizations and intelligence, not developers. That’s what set this transformation in motion.”
The transformation was deliberate and strategic. One of the biggest challenges was that existing reports were “artistically crafted by engineers,” making them difficult to maintain or scale.
In just three months, BlueCloud delivered results that completely reshaped the company’s analytics landscape:
- Built a scalable, future-ready data foundation
- Streamlined analytics processes to reduce lag time and manual work
- Enabled real-time ingestion and fast reporting
- Unified data pipelines for clarity and control across teams
- Delivered a reusable Coalesce transformation framework that gives teams a governed, extendable backbone for future analytics and AI use cases
Key Achievements
Live Customer Conversations
Real-time analytics allowed teams to engage with users proactively and in context, strengthening trust and communication.
Personalized Promotions
With faster access to behavioral data, the network delivered targeted promotions that resonated with its community, boosting engagement and conversion.
Improved Customer Experience
Unified data flows gave users a consistent, seamless experience across touchpoints—driving satisfaction and loyalty.
Smarter Retail Decisions
Operational teams gained clearer visibility into trends and performance, enabling faster, more informed decisions that optimized results.
The Power of Coalesce: Building Fast, Clean, and Scalable Data Transformations
By standardizing transformation in Coalesce, the team gained a governed, repeatable way to turn raw retail transactions into analytics-ready datasets—without slowing down development.
Coalesce, the ELT automation tool, stood at the heart of the client’s data transformation, driving agility and speed by revolutionizing how data was structured, transformed, and delivered across the retail ecosystem. Working alongside BlueCloud’s Snowflake experts, Coalesce became the engine behind this innovation, turning semi-structured JSON data from transactional systems into clean, analytics-ready tables within Snowflake.
It was chosen for its ease of adoption, a perfect fit for distributed teams that included both experienced engineers and junior developers. Its low-code, visual interface made it possible for anyone on the team to design, manage, and execute complex transformations with confidence.
As the client explained during implementation:
“I liked Coalesce mostly because of the ease of adoption. Coalesce fits our people. Having a rich UI tool from Coalesce made all the difference.”
And the human factor mattered too. BlueCloud’s Coalesce experts played a crucial role, mentoring the internal team and empowering them to build clean, scalable transformation logic.
By using Coalesce, the team achieved extraordinary results:
- Transformed semi-structured JSON data from transactional systems into clean, analytics-ready tables in Snowflake with unprecedented speed, in just 12 weeks.
- Gained a modular transformation framework that made future scalability simple.
Think of it as building data architecture with “data Legos”, flexible blocks that can be reused and rearranged to meet evolving needs. This usability was essential to the project’s incredible speed: in just 12 weeks, they went from zero Snowflake implementation to a scalable framework that makes future reporting, analytics, and AI integration simple to expand.
The Role of Snowflake: The Cloud Core of Modern Retail Intelligence
At the center of it all stood Snowflake, the modern data platform that gave the company the flexibility it desperately needed.
“We wanted to put Snowflake at the center of this business,” explained the client. “It’s an amazing product and being cloud-based meant we didn’t have to manage infrastructure. That was the key. We’re retail transaction people. We scan, we bank, we charge, we get you out the door. We wanted to focus on what we’re great at, not maintaining servers.”
By shifting analytics to Snowflake, the organization achieved:
- Zero infrastructure management freeing up internal resources
- High-speed performance for analytics and reporting
- Elastic scalability to handle peak retail demand
- Integration flexibility with both legacy and modern systems
Many of the company’s retail partners were already using Snowflake and urging them to join the ecosystem. That made the decision even clearer. Snowflake became a strategic hub for collaboration, scalability, and innovation.
The Impact: Transforming Retail Intelligence for a Customer-Centric Commerce Leader
Instead of forcing cloud tech into places it didn’t belong, the commerce leader focused on using the right tools in the right places, keeping store systems offline-capable, while centralizing analysis and data sharing in Snowflake. Now, with clean, unified data and a roadmap toward AI-driven loyalty and CRM solutions, the client is paving the way for retail modernization.
This transformation put real-time insight and customer experience at the center of operations, empowering the leader in unified commerce to move faster, connect deeper, and build stronger relationships with its community.
With Coalesce handling transformation, Snowflake providing the backbone, and BlueCloud guiding the overall strategy, this global leader in retail achieved something far greater than migration. They created a living, breathing data ecosystem built for innovation.
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