Why API and ETL are best friends

People often ask, when Switchboard extracts data from disparate sources and applies its ETL (extract, transform, load) process, are there limiting factors? Will it work with any data format? How fast?

The answer is that Switchboard is designed and customized to normalize all the raw data for our customers in real-time using API connectors.

A modern data automation solution utilizes connectors that access the core applications (APIs), although in some cases, the platform uses raw files. So the data automation platform should be able to work with any existing application you have. If you are looking to leverage data to make critical business decisions, this is an important insight.

We believe that connecting streams of disparate data should be simple and fast. We make connectors so you don’t have to wrestle with changing APIs and monitoring the health of live feeds. Billions of rows of data, hundreds of data sources – we’ve done the heavy-lifting so you can make confident decisions from your data.

To put it in context, one of our customers has over 40 brands and is looking to create a single source of truth. They ingest over 1 billion rows of data daily to support the revenue team’s growth objectives. In the past, this was extremely expensive to support because it required thousands of data engineering hours to manually extract, transform, and load the data. My eyes get blurry thinking about it. With Switchboard’s data automation, their data now yields new insights in real-time across a range of brands, platforms, and ad types. They are also able to instantly make decisions and be aware of trends and causes, and they have accelerated their project timelines using data automation in excess of six months while saving $750k in manual labor.

So, when getting started on your data journey, remember: the goal is to focus on making decisions from the data, not figuring out how to get the data. You just need the right automation solution that ETLs your API data to arrive at that single source of truth, which we call foundational data.