How Novo eliminated $300,000 in data infrastructure costs and over $500,000 in people costs.

Novo, a digital banking provider, quadrupled its data volumes in a year. But their existing data infrastructure struggled to keep pace with this growth.

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The company’s data stack was Snowflake for data warehousing, dbt enterprise, their own managed Airflow, self hosted Metabase, and custom data pipelines. As they started to evaluate the true cost of scaling  their own data platform, they realized the data infrastructure costs were going to 2.5x as their volume of data grew 4x. They realized this approach wasn’t cost or time effective. 

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Further, for a team of 20 data professionals, they needed 3–4 people to maintain their platform.

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“Our data infrastructure was not equipped to sustain the rate of growth we were experiencing. We considered scaling up our stack in-house but the overhead did not make sense. We rejected the idea since it was a waste of our time to focus on anything but the core business.”

Anthony M. Jerkovic

Head of Data

Novo implemented 5X's end-to-end data platform on top of their Snowflake Instance. This included

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Managed data ingestion

Modeling and orchestration

Semantic layer

Business intelligence

Data & AI apps

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“Moving our airflow and dbt jobs was seamless as they are fully compatible with 5X. More so, it gave us a semantic layer and data apps that we just never would have invested in building out.”

Anthony M. Jerkovic

Head of Data

When Novo implemented the 5X platform, the results went far beyond cost reduction. They experienced a complete transformation in how their data team operated, enabling them to shift focus from infrastructure management to creating genuine business value. Here's how 5X made a meaningful difference:

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$300,000 Annual savings

Novo conducted a thorough analysis of their data infrastructure costs and discovered substantial savings with 5X:

• Previous infrastructure approach would have cost approximately $650,000 annually
• Implementation of the 5X platform reduced costs by $300,000

$500,000 Saved in people costs

The impact on Novo's data team meant that they no longer needed a standalone data platform team and could, thus, focus on business-facing data engineers, analysts, and data scientists.

• They could now repurpose platform engineers to business facing products
• This accounted to over $500k of savings in people resources needed for building and managing the data platform

Expanded technical capabilities

The cherry on top was that Novo gained new capabilities that they did not have on their roadmap:

• Addition of a semantic layer that was not previously available for standardizing metric definitions across BI, analytics, and AI
• Implementation of a unified orchestration system that seamlessly manages both dbt jobs and data science workflows
• Data & AI apps that can be deployed on the 5X platform

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“In my experience, data teams are always playing catch-up for the business. For the first time, we are ahead of the business and able to deliver new capabilities without being asked for them. And the team at 5X ships new capabilities weekly so our platform keeps getting better.”

Anthony M. Jerkovic

Head of Data

The 5X platform continues to evolve with weekly releases, including the innovative concept of data and AI apps. This ongoing development ensures Novo stays ahead of business requirements while focusing their resources on growth and customer experience.