Delivering access to data exploration, cost savings, and new business opportunities for customers

About

Domino Data Lab powers model-driven businesses. Its leading Enterprise Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) platform accelerates the development and the deployment of data science work while increasing collaboration and governance. More than 20 percent of Fortune 100 companies leverage the Enterprise MLOps Platform with real-world implications in areas such as cancer research, drug development, and sustainable agriculture. Domino wanted to accelerate the data science lifecycle by enabling secure and seamless access to the multitude of data platforms used by clients.

Challenge

Domino Data Lab’s Enterprise MLOps Platform acts as a system of record for data science, enabling team collaboration with data scientists and their preferred tools, languages, and infrastructure. 

To maintain seamless access to a variety of data sources, Domino Data Lab needed a performant, enterprise-ready query engine to power its customer-facing and revenue-generating platform. The solution it chose would be critical to customer satisfaction as well as their own success. It needed to have the proper access control measures in place to protect sensitive data while valuing data scientists’ time. This allowed data scientists to focus on developing and deploying models, spending less time on DevOps barriers related to finding, accessing, and connecting to data. 

Domino Data Lab had already started on a path to build out its own connectors. However, that turned out to be too expensive and challenging from an engineering perspective — it took a couple of weeks minimum just to build a simple connector on their own.

Solution

Domino Data Lab’s engineering team looked into a couple of different query engines. The team ultimately chose Starburst Enterprise due to:

• Secure data access with Starburst’s fine-grained access control, end-to-end data encryption, user authentication, and detailed security auditing.
• A connector library with over 50+ enterprise data sources, from data lakes and warehouses to streaming systems, relational databases, and more.
• A high-performing query engine with fast, simple-to-scale SQL performance.

“Having a platform where data sources are easily shared between data scientists and getting to that level of ubiquity is paramount for this work. So we started looking into query engines, and Starburst checked all the boxes for us in terms of how it would integrate with our offering and platform.” 

Murat Cetin, Senior Engineering Manager at Domino Data Lab

Results

After deploying Starburst Enterprise, Domino Data Lab has documented measurable impact including:

90% reduction in connector development time. Starburst connectors improve time-to-market by taking only one to two days to deploy, instead of weeks or even months to build. 

3x cost savings. Starburst connectors save Domino thousands of dollars in engineering costs over building them in-house. The company also saves money with Starburst’s secure access to data sources. 

New revenue streams. New data sources and expanded connectivity increase the number of clients that can be served.   

Improved customer experience. Reducing time to data discovery and exploration results in increased customer satisfaction. 

With the help of Starburst Enterprise, Domino Data Lab is making machine-learning model development and deployment as easy and efficient as possible, accelerating time-to-market and unlocking new business opportunities for customers.