Dotz: How Google Cloud supported business expansion and cut costs
About Dotz
With 20 years of experience and more than 40 million clients, Dotz is the leading loyalty program of Brazilian retail. Its namesake currency (DZ) is present in 12 marketplaces and 690 cities, allowing consumers to earn DZ with their purchases from a large network of brick-and-mortar and online partners and then exchange DZ currency for more than 50,000 product offerings, including airline tickets, bill payments, and cell phone top-ups. More than DZ 900 are distributed every second and more than 10,000 exchanges are made every day.
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Contact usUsing Google Cloud’s tools, Brazil’s top loyalty program Dotz successfully cut costs after migrating 4 TB of data from hardware to the cloud.
Google Cloud results
- More than 7.8 billion lines migrated (4 TB worth of data)
- BRL 800,000 in annual savings
- Autoscaling to keep up with business growth
- Increased productivity for professionals
- Accelerated flow development and increased agility for the team
- Daily data loading with instant availability and no maintenance periods; loading time went from nearly 16 hours to minutes
More than 7.8 billion lines migrated - 4 TB worth of data
Established in the 2000s, Dotz is a loyalty program in Brazil that operates in 13 of the country’s states and has a vast portfolio of regional and national retail partners, including ecommerce and banks. After acquiring its then-competitor Netpoints in 2018, the company doubled its client base from 20 million to 40 million users and onboarded new retail partners and expanded its operations in the state of São Paulo.
Even before acquiring Netpoints, the Dotz IT team had warned that a surge in user numbers would significantly increase its volume of data and in turn the demand for storage, computing, and availability. The company made the strategic decision to preempt that negative scenario and prepare for their tech needs. After all, Dotz was still using hardware to host its database and had accrued a certain volume since its creation.
Dotz needed a scalable cloud-based solution that could keep up with the company’s expansion, ensure high performance for its business units, and support large data volumes. There were 7.8 billion lines to migrate, totaling 4 TB worth of data. For this important mission, Dotz chose Google Cloud, and the results were felt as quickly as the growth experienced by the company, now encompassing hundreds of partners and nearly 300 collaborators.
From machines to the cloud and BRL 800,000 a year in savings
Data migration to Google Cloud’s environment started in 2018 and continued for almost two years because of the massive volume. The entire process was led by three professionals from Dotz: Jonathas Mendes, Big Data Coordinator; Iron Cardoso, Senior Data Engineer; and Lucas Rosa, Data Engineering Specialist and Data Engineer certified by Google Cloud, which played a key role in the migration. They were also supported by Diogenes Justo, head of the data department, to get the project done. “It is worth noting that the communication and support from the Google Cloud team was critical, particularly when we had any questions or concerns,” says Mendes.
Various platform tools were adopted by the team. “We used Cloud Composer to orchestrate ETLs, whose ingestion is done through Dataflow. BigQuery was used as a data warehouse. Everything was automated using Cloud Datastore as setup,” explains Mendes. BigQuery was especially important for supporting transactional data and unburdening the team from worrying about setting up machine infrastructure.
With a serverless cloud infrastructure, Dotz also enhanced performance and automation. “We experience a huge productivity boost compared with the previous environment. One example is the agility of business units when bringing value to our partners,” Mendes says.
With these new solutions, the team was able to perform analyses and load data in a matter of minutes, a task that used to take around 16 hours. The data, which wasn't loaded on weekends, is now loaded every day, with instant availability and no maintenance periods.
The company saves BRL 800,000 a year thanks to disabling the data storage machines, license termination, and other changes brought by the migration. Everything comes with ensured high scalability, high availability and high performance.
Takeaways for more efficient processes
One of the main takeaways for the Dotz team after adopting cloud tools was the creation of parameterizable generic flows, which made flow development simpler and less error prone and added agility to the routine of IT professionals.
Preparing the infrastructure to keep up with Dotz’s expansion also proved essential for the business, so they could keep storing all client and partner data with scalability. “If we hadn’t used Google Cloud, the company would certainly have less data, and we would have purged some data due to storage constraints. Analyses would take longer, and all of that would impact directly on the company’s decision making process,” says Mendes.
The Big Data Coordinator adds that using infrastructure was another selling point for Dotz. “We are not amateurs. Our partner data is stored in one of the world’s best cloud companies.”
After completing the migration, the company is already planning to adopt more Google Cloud tools, including AutoML Vision and Data Catalog with DLP, which will be deployed in Data Science and Data Governance.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Dotz
With 20 years of experience and more than 40 million clients, Dotz is the leading loyalty program of Brazilian retail. Its namesake currency (DZ) is present in 12 marketplaces and 690 cities, allowing consumers to earn DZ with their purchases from a large network of brick-and-mortar and online partners and then exchange DZ currency for more than 50,000 product offerings, including airline tickets, bill payments, and cell phone top-ups. More than DZ 900 are distributed every second and more than 10,000 exchanges are made every day.