City Furniture Leverages Denodo’s Data Virtualization to Establish an Enterprise Logical Data Fabric in Support of Its Digital Transformation

By STS News Desk On Nov 8, 2021

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Denodo, the leader in data virtualization, announced that its customer, City Furniture, has completed an enterprise-wide digital transformation where data science and advanced analytics has become the foundation for the company’s new digital business model. Underpinned by the Denodo Platform, the fast growing retail company was able to virtualize all its data sources and create a semantic layer to connect and deliver critical data to its marketing, sales, operations, supply chain, and merchandising functions and grow the business beyond the borders of Florida.

As a part of this announcement, and to underscore the value and success City Furniture realized by implementing the Denodo Platform, the Company has been named a finalist in the Digital Technology category in this year’s Ventana Research Digital Leadership Awards. City Furniture was acknowledged for its use of Denodo’s data virtualization technology to gain a competitive advantage and digitally transform the organization and the industry. The award recognizes individuals and companies that have utilized and championed improvements across their people, processes, information and technology to grow their business and industry potential.

“After a proof-of-concept deployment in early 2020, and as COVID-19 began to spread across the country, we quickly realized that data virtualization was a crucial technology to aid our paradigm shift of becoming a data-driven business.”

“By leveraging the Denodo Platform, we’re now able to connect data much faster so data consumers across the organization can drive business intelligence and advanced analytics,” said Ryan Fattini, Director of Data Engineering at City Furniture. “After a proof-of-concept deployment in early 2020, and as COVID-19 began to spread across the country, we quickly realized that data virtualization was a crucial technology to aid our paradigm shift of becoming a data-driven business.”

City Furniture, an online retailer with a chain of physical stores in Florida, started as a small family business that has grown to reach annual sales of $1 billion dollars. But during their business transformation, the company encountered challenges with slow and inefficient traditional data management technologies. They needed a culture shift to embrace modern technologies, such as data virtualization, to create an enterprise wide logical data fabric. In fact, City Furniture’s use of data virtualization and their resulting digital transformation helped them to:

Create a standardized data access layer for all of their data sources, on-prem and cloud.
Minimize the movement and replication of data, user privacy, and compliance.
Establish an enterprise wide logical data fabric.
Support executives, data scientists, and business users so they could easily use their BI tool of choice.
Enable every function including sales, supply chain, merchandizing, and operations to feed of off a single source of truth.
Create DevOps automation, so data scientists and analysts could focus on rigorous analytics and model building.

“It’s a common tale these days; business growth often spurs digital transformation, but organizations continue to struggle with connecting valuable data strewn across multiple locations,” said Ravi Shankar, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Denodo. “However, this has not stopped companies like City Furniture to adopt modern data integration technologies like the Denodo Platform to accelerate their digital transformation. We also applaud them for being named a finalist in this year’s Ventana Digital Leadership Award, as Ryan and his team recognize the power of data virtualization and how it could serve as a core component of their logical data fabric.”

This project resulted in a deep cultural shift. It moved data from having an “orbital” position within City Furniture to being part of the very nucleus of it. Tactically, the project has enabled the company to deliver 40 new reports that are full of actionable production insight, which are definitely driving better business decisions every day. As a result, City Furniture have picked up market share, and much of that can be attributed to their data virtualization project.

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