Real-Time Occupancy Analytics Case Study with Ramp

Density

Density: Trusted Space Optimization Data for an Evolving Workplace

Density is the leading space analytics platform for measuring and improving workplaces. Their platform works with large, constantly-changing data sets to help companies enhance the workplace experiences for employees.

Density’s customers use the platform to optimize building occupancy from both a financial and an employee experience standpoint. Density helps companies validate how to best use their real estate, one of the largest expenses incurred by most businesses.

Real-Time Updates for People-Counting Sensors

As Density’s Tech Lead for the Deployment & Onboarding team, Software Engineer Ryan Gaus’ main goal is to make sensor installation and setup as seamless as possible for customers.

Calibrating and validating sensor accuracy is a primary priority for the Density Customer Success team. As Gaus states, ”The most critical part of the customer onboarding process — where we apply enormous rigor — is making sure sensors are deployed so they’re able to do their job: count people accurately.” Rapid diagnosis of any customer issue is critical, as this calibration is central to the first experience customers have with Density.

Our customer success team's job has been made significantly easier, and it's definitely saved them a ton of time! Materialize was the low-friction way of getting our existing series of databases into one single pane of view.
— Ryan Gaus

Materialize for Sensor Calibration

Gaus and team streamline data into an in-house centralized system for collecting, combining, and analyzing sensor data for the Customer Success team. Within this system, team members can filter and view different sensor health metrics, which requires the aggregation of various data sources into a single pane of view.

According to Gaus, ”When Customer Success looks at the sensor table, they expect everything to be completely and always up to date.

He added, ”We needed a new real-time engine for our in-house tool, and it had to be a database with the same schema, table, and Postgres interface.

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Getting Going Fast with Materialize

Gaus and team started testing Materialize and were quickly impressed with its ease of use and time to value.

As Gaus puts it ”Now, with Materialize, things update in near real-time, measured in the hundreds of milliseconds. Without this process improvement, it would have been a challenge to scale up our non-technical team to handle the fast-growing number of sensors we have to support today.

Customer Success could now use the homegrown in-house tool as their one source of truth. Gaus continued: ”Our customer success team’s job has been made significantly easier, and it’s definitely saved them a ton of time! Materialize was the low-friction way of getting our existing series of databases into one single pane of view.

Now, with Materialize, things update in near real-time, measured in the hundreds of milliseconds. Without this process improvement, it would have been a challenge to scale up our non-technical team to handle the fast-growing number of sensors we have to support today.
— Ryan Gaus

Saving Development Time with Instantaneous Real-Time Updates in Materialize

Because Materialize has helped unlock powerful sensor analytics in real-time, it’s allowed Density’s software engineering team to take on work that would typically fall under their lean data engineering team.

According to Gaus, ”Materialize has let us outsource a lot of what we would be doing with Data Engineering, which has been nice for quick iteration. We’ve saved I-don’t-know-how-many untold quarters of trying to build our own thing.

Gaus summarized his initial experiences with Materialize positively, stating, ”If you need to be able to pull data from multiple systems in a fast fashion, and you want to not worry about a lot of the low-level details like cache invalidation or data sinking, it’s a great solution.

Materialize has let us outsource a lot of what we would be doing with Data Engineering, which has been nice for quick iteration. We've saved I-don't-know-how-many untold quarters of trying to build our own thing.
— Ryan Gaus

Materialize is a streaming database for real-time analytics. Materialize simplifies how developers build with real-time data, using incremental computation to provide low latency, correct answers - all using standard SQL. With nearly a decade of technical research behind it, Materialize was launched to address the growing need for the ability to build real-time applications easily and efficiently on streaming data so that businesses can obtain actionable intelligence from streaming data.

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