$6B
IN ANNUAL REVENUE
19
global locations
12
YEARS' DATA MOVED IN 1 WEEKEND
Based in Milpitas, California, KLA is a Fortune 500 company at the center of breakthrough technology, producing the process controls and yield management systems that help manufacturers like Intel and Samsung bring the highest-quality semiconductors to market. To better service its expanding customer base and satisfy internal demand for analytics, KLA partnered with Informatica and Snowflake to accelerate a cloud-first data strategy, expediting critical reports and informed decision-making across multiple core business teams.
Sandeep Kancharla
Migrating to a single, scalable cloud data lake
With the business growing quickly, Sandeep Kancharla, Director of Advanced Analytics and Data Sciences, knew that the company’s expert physicists, engineers, data scientists, and business executives depend on real-time insights to predict and meet demand. While KLA’s on-premises data warehouse performed well most of the time, it had difficulty during critical periods of peak demand, particularly the end of each month or quarter. Additionally, not all major business units used the data warehouse, and some had their own systems.
“We needed a centralized data warehouse to provide a single source of truth for all users that we could scale up and down as our business fluctuates,” says Kancharla. “We decided to follow a cloud-first strategy, because we just couldn’t scale cost effectively on-premises.”
To make data consistently available for reporting and analytics, Kancharla and his team searched for a cloud platform that could scale on demand and connect to any on-premises or cloud data source. They chose an integrated, cloud-native solution that combines a Snowflake Data Cloud with Informatica Cloud Data Integration and Informatica Cloud Mass Ingestion, using Snowflake’s transformation capabilities to process the data after it is loaded.
“We chose Informatica and Snowflake because the tools are easy to use, they do everything we need, and we only need to train our team on two technologies,” says Kancharla. “The power of Informatica is that we can do ETL, ELT, and mass ingestion at scale, all with a single integrated cloud platform, to deliver trusted information to our data consumers.”
“We chose Informatica and Snowflake because the tools are easy to use, they do everything we need, and we only need to train our team on two technologies. The power of Informatica is that we can do ETL, ELT, and mass ingestion at scale, all with a single integrated cloud platform, to deliver trusted information to our data consumers.”
Saving time and money with improved sales forecasting
By combining multiple data sources in the cloud for analysis – including SAP ERP and SAP CRM, among other sales and manufacturing systems –Kancharla’ s team now supports more detailed and user-friendly reporting, so that teams can predict demand across complex and often customized product groups.
"Our senior director of sales wants to see how the pipeline forecast is changing,” says Kancharla. “Instead of relying on spreadsheets and emails, she wants a single place to view trends and weekly snapshots of opportunities. With Informatica and Snowflake, our sales teams can better predict demand and increase revenue from both new and existing customers."
Convenient dashboards built with Microsoft Power BI pull data from Snowflake and shed light on sales performance, as well as service contracts and overall customer satisfaction. Previously, these reports took teams of five up to two weeks to pull data from SAP CRM. Now, Kancharla’s team produces the reports weekly, meeting demand for analytics even at month-end and quarter-end—a feat that was unattainable without a scalable cloud platform.
“Our VP of Finance is extremely pleased with the P&L dashboard we’ve built using Informatica, Snowflake, and Power BI,” says Kancharla. “He can have more informed discussions with Wall Street and make decisions much faster. The company is growing through M&A, and without cloud-based solutions, we could not have sustained that growth. We could not have executed this quickly.”
Moving 12 years of data to the cloud in one weekend
Freed from the scalability constraints of on-premises solutions, Kancharla and his team continue to deliver fast results to KLA. Informatica Cloud Mass Ingestion allows for continuous replication to the cloud data lake. Over a single weekend, a database administrator and data architect moved approximately 1,000 Oracle database tables representing 12 years of historical ERP data into Snowflake, where it is now available for analysis. Incremental changes in Oracle data are automatically captured and integrated directly into Snowflake.
With efficient cloud-based ingestion, KLA saves days of manual effort on reconciliation, a process that could previously take weeks to complete. This opens the door to a broader range of business and technical use cases moving forward, helping KLA maintain its data-driven edge.
“We can execute faster on advanced analytics using Informatica,” says Kancharla. “It’s easy to bring massive data into Snowflake and make it ready for our engineering, sales, and executive teams to consume—helping them deliver solutions to our customers and evaluate service delivery.”
Inside the solution
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Informatica Cloud Mass Ingestion
Snowflake
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