Success story · Higher education · United States

The challenge

The university has its own team responsible for data and business intelligence. But most of that team's time went into keeping an outdated data platform alive.

• $11,000 a month for a platform that no longer matched the university's needs.
• Every change needed manual work from the IT team - new environments, updates, configuration.
• Engineers kept systems running instead of delivering insights to the business.

What we did

We replaced the old platform with Faro Lighthouse, our data foundation, running on Microsoft Azure. What used to be done by hand - provisioning, updates, new environments - is now automated.

The savings did not come from one big switch, but from many decisions made together: environments defined as code and running only when they are needed, incremental instead of full data loads, fewer environments, no more paying for reserved capacity far above actual use, and optimised processing.

The result

• Monthly platform cost down from $11,000 to $1,700 - an 85% reduction.
• About $112,000 a year freed for higher-value initiatives - before counting the time the team no longer spends on maintenance.
• Less manual work and a lower risk of configuration errors.
• The data team refocused on analytics and business insights.

What it changed for the business

The same money now funds new initiatives instead of infrastructure. And the foundation built here became the base for the next step: an AI assistant that turns a 3-day search into a 15-minute conversation.

More results

• Live in 3 months - a cloud analytics foundation for a regulated financial company
• 40+ systems, one data foundation - a Danish investment company
• From 3 days to 15 minutes - an AI assistant on trusted data

We don't name our clients without their consent. All figures come from the client implementations described.