Customer Story

How Holmes Corporation Productized Analytics for Partners with an External-Facing Analytics Platform

What we did

Identified hidden inefficiencies, redundant costs, and data gaps within weeks, then translated them into a prioritized execution plan tied directly to external-facing analytics and revenue opportunities.

Built and operationalized a modern data foundation that reduced reporting cycles from weeks to hours and established a scalable backbone for analytics delivery.

Delivered an embedded analytics experience that enabled new deployments in 4–6 weeks and reduced manual outreach workload by 45% through automation.

Industry

  • Services

Technologies

  • Azure
  • ·
  • Databricks
  • ·
  • Omni

Weeks → Hours for Data Requests

Customer data requests reduced from weeks to hours.

45% Less

Manual Work

Manual outreach workload reduced with an integrated platform.

4–6 Week

Launches

New customer analytics deployments that took months now live in 4–6 weeks.

The Challenge

Holmes Corporation (HC) delivers learning and certification preparation programs for associations and enterprise organizations, with data playing an increasingly central role in how those programs are evaluated and delivered. Although they had built a strong customer-driven analytics platform, their data infrastructure could not support the experience the market now expected.

Their business captured rich data across customer activity, performance, and engagement, but it was difficult to access, fragmented across systems, and largely underutilized. Reporting was slow and manual, requiring custom pulls and spreadsheet manipulation for each request.

This created a bottleneck. Internal teams could not keep up with growing demand, and customers lacked timely access to insights they needed to measure outcomes and make better decisions.

Leadership also saw a bigger opportunity: data could become a differentiated part of their product offering for customers. What they lacked was a clear path to get there.

The Solution

We began with a focused data strategy assessment built to surface what the business could not easily see on its own. We traced how data moved through HC’s products, how customers consumed it, and where the experience broke down. That work exposed hidden inefficiencies, unnecessary spend, and gaps between the value the business wanted to deliver and what its data foundation could support.

  • “Analytics8 didn’t try to sell us discovery work we didn’t need.

    They interviewed our key stakeholders, reviewed everything we had, and mapped it all to our business priorities. By the readout, I was blown away. They found things we didn’t even know we were still paying for. That speed-to-value approach is exactly what you should demand from any data partner.”
    Steven Khraiss
    VP of Data Strategy & Analytics, Holmes Corp

The assessment resulted in a roadmap the business could execute across data, product, and leadership.
 
The project entailed:

  • Defining a prioritized set of external-facing analytics use cases aligned to how HC delivers value, including performance visibility, engagement tracking, and benchmarking capabilities
  • Designing and implementing a modern Databricks data foundation within their Azure environment to centralize data, eliminate silos, and support scalable analytics and future AI use cases
  • Restructuring and modeling core business data to enable consistent reporting across products, associations, and internal stakeholders
  • Optimizing existing ingestion pipelines in Azure Data Factory to reduce complexity, improve reliability, and lower the cost of moving and processing data
  • Establishing a governed semantic layer in Omni to standardize metric definitions and ensure internal teams and external customers operate from the same trusted data
  • Building embedded analytics dashboards that gives customers direct access to timely insights directly within their existing experience, instead of relying on manual reporting
  • Creating repeatable reporting frameworks and templates that HC can scale across customers without rebuilding analytics for each new engagement

The Results

HC moved from reacting to requests to operating with a clear, structured plan tied to how the business delivers value. The impact showed up quickly — in how data is accessed, how teams operate, and how analytics support the business.

Immediate Business Impact:

  • External data requests that previously took weeks are now answered in hours, with performance, engagement, and benchmarking insights delivered directly to hundreds of partners, instructors, and enterprise customers through embedded analytics. The shift goes beyond speed. HC evolved from providing data access to delivering visual analytics. Partners previously downloaded raw data and manipulated it in spreadsheets, a process that required both time and technical skill. Now they get interactive dashboards that answer questions at a glance: which learners are on track, which modules are causing the most trouble, and how students are improving over time. For partners who still prefer hands-on analysis, raw data exports remain available, giving them the best of both worlds.

Users described the module-level data breakdowns in their analytics dashboards as ‘an instructor’s dream,’ because performance issues are immediately visible and actionable.

  • Internally, teams stopped spending days reconciling conflicting numbers across systems and started working from a shared set of definitions, enabling real-time decision-making instead of retrospective reporting.

Efficiency and Cost Gains:

  • The assessment surfaced areas of unnecessary spend and operational drag that had gone unnoticed, reducing complexity across data pipelines and creating an efficient path to scale analytics without added overhead.
  • New external analytics deployments that once took months now take 4-6 weeks from kickoff to go-live, driven by repeatable frameworks and reusable components.
  • The data platform enabled a behavioral automation system that reduced manual outreach workload by 45% while maintaining or improving learner activation rates.

Positioned for ‘What’s Next’:

With a centralized platform, governed metrics, and a clear roadmap in place, HC is positioned to:

  • Expand embedded analytics across more customer experiences
  • Activate marketing and finance use cases already identified in the roadmap, increasing the return on their data investment across more areas of the business
  • Create a more complete view of the customer journey by integrating CRM and prospect data into Databricks, enabling richer insights through Omni

  • “Working with Analytics8 has been absolutely amazing.

    Not only do they understand the needs of our business and where I’m trying to take the department, but I think of them more as an extension of our team versus a vendor.”
    Steven Khraiss
    VP of Data Strategy & Analytics, Holmes Corp.

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