60% decrease in cloud-related IT costs
80% decrease in IT management time
<1 month to migrate IT infrastructure to Google Cloud
Entire IT infrastructure, data platform, and third-party database migrated to Google Cloud in under two months.
Entire IT infrastructure, data platform, and third-party database migrated to Google Cloud in under two months.
Using data to generate alpha
If "money makes the world go 'round'," data is what's making money — so investors are constantly on the lookout for new sources for data.
Financial data like stock and commodities prices are available from myriad sources. But hedge funds, private equity firms, and venture capitalists need more than The Wall Street Journal to generate "positive alpha" — the savvy behind above-market-rate ROI.
Thinknum provides its customers with "alternative data": information on a half-million companies around the globe, scraped from publicly available websites and curated into massive datasets that would otherwise be unavailable.
"Thinknum's proprietary machine learning algorithms index the public web to create more than two dozen structured datasets," explains Boris Spiwak, Thinknum's chief operating officer. "We track things like job listings, employee headcount, social media traction, employee sentiment, product pricing, and store locations — any web-based data that could give our customers an edge in making investment decisions."
Google Cloud is crucial to our ability to provide value for our customers by delivering historical datasets that are updated in real time.
Boris Spiwak
Chief Operating Officer, Thinknum
For example, Thinknum's pricing data for approximately 2.3 million products enables more accurate inflation forecasting. Job listing data, sourced directly from companies' applicant tracking systems, can be a leading indicator of corporate performance. Employee sentiment data can even be used to gauge whether a sales team is hitting its revenue targets.
All that data, as well as the no-code platform that Thinknum customers use to easily access it, visualize it, and import it into their internal systems, is housed on Google Cloud.
"Google Cloud is crucial to our ability to provide value for our customers with historical datasets that are updated in real time," Spiwak adds. But that wasn't always the case.
60% lower costs, 80% less IT admin time
Thinknum's IT infrastructure, which had been built in-house and relied on a third-party database and out-of-date operating system, was maintenance-intensive. Hoping to lower IT costs with a consolidated, managed-services solution, Thinknum attempted to migrate its platform, IT infrastructure, and database, but the project had to be abandoned.
"After a year-long pilot, it became obvious that the project would be overly complex and cost-prohibitive, and that our previous cloud provider wasn't a viable option," Spiwak recalls, adding that porting over the database itself was especially thorny.
It was then that Thinknum turned to Google, attracted by the hands-on technical guidance for the migration it offered, as well as its competitive pricing.
"After struggling for so long with our previous cloud provider, we were blown away by how swiftly and smoothly the migration to Google Cloud went," Spiwak reports. "We migrated and upgraded our entire infrastructure in the first month. Just one month later, our 15TB database, which housed more than 10 years of historical data, was up and running on Google Cloud."
BigQuery now acts as Thinknum's unified data platform, while AlloyDB serves as its core data storage, eliminating all non-managed infrastructure except for the servers running proprietary code.
"Our cloud-related costs, including storage, compute, administration, and licensing, have plummeted 60% since the migration," Spiwak reports. "By eliminating routine tasks like database cluster administration on virtual servers, we've reduced monthly IT management time from 140 hours to 30 hours."
The nearly 80% decrease is allowing Thinknum engineers to concentrate on product development and client satisfaction instead of infrastructure management.
After struggling for so long with our previous cloud provider, we were blown away by how swiftly and smoothly the migration to Google Cloud went.
Boris Spiwak
Chief Operating Officer, Thinknum
In addition to the technology itself, Spiwak credits Google Cloud Partner CWX, as well as Thinknum's Google Cloud team, with how quickly and smoothly the migration proceeded. "The white-glove treatment we received from CWX and Google Cloud stood in a stark contrast to our experience with our previous provider and ensured the project’s success," he says.
A migration assisted by Gemini
Gemini also played a critical role in the migration. Google Cloud in-console AI tools were used to optimize database queries by examining two months of database activity, then suggesting tweaks to the SQL queries that power Thinknum's analytics capabilities. "As our datasets grow, query response time tends to increase," Spiwak explains. "Gemini helped us accelerate platform response times without adding to processing or compute costs."
To flatten the learning curve that comes with any new system, Thinknum engineers used Gemini to provide guidance on best practices for Google Cloud security and maintenance procedures.
"Gemini not only contributed to minimizing downtown, it even helped us strengthen several architectural flaws in Thinknum's IT configuration," Spiwak adds.
Gemini not only contributed to minimizing down time, it even helped us strengthen several architectural flaws in Thinknum's IT configuration.
Boris Spiwak
Chief Operating Officer, Thinknum
Google Cloud is also instrumental to Thinknum's platform development: Engineers leverage Cloud Run for running proprietary code on Google Cloud, Gemini Code Assist to help speed up coding, and Cloud Build for developing, testing, and deploying new features.
Among the new features planned is a user interface tailored not to financial services companies but to corporate customers. This growing segment of Thinknum's customer base leverages "people analytics" to improve workforce performance, engagement, and retention and help HR teams make data-driven decisions.
"As more and more social and economic activity moves online, more data trails are left in cyberspace," Spiwak observes. "Google Cloud is enabling Thinknum to capture and structure that data so our customers can extract the valuable insights that inform the kind of decision-making that keeps them ahead of the competition."
Nine of America's top 10 investment banks, as well as some of the world's largest hedge funds and institutional investors, use Thinknum alternative data to make better investment decisions.
Industries: Financial Services, Startup
Location: United States
Products: AlloyDB, BigQuery, Cloud Build, Cloud Run, Gemini, Gemini Code Assist, Google Cloud
About Google Cloud partner - CWX
CWX provides its global customers with customized solutions for Google Cloud migrations, Agentspace deployments, and integrating AI- and ML-driven technologies.
