In order to see the value of Nimbus Intelligence Connectors, we have to first situate them in the current context. Data ingestion from sources is the foundation of a pipeline, without it, there are no data marts, no Machine Learning models and no dashboards. Therefore, choosing an ingestion method for your pipeline can be a crucial decision.
There are many options for this, but overall, they fall into two big blocks:
- Pricey : Established vendors that provide businesses with fully fledged solutions for their data ingestion. Typically, whether it is pay per refresh or pay per row, these solutions are costly, and completely prohibitive for the Small to Medium Business.
- Custom/Free : Other solutions exist, from open source projects that are maintained by a community to having an in house data engineer that creates scripts to load the data in a customized way. In both cases, issues like hosting, orchestration, debugging, and disaster recovery are at the hands of the business. Again, for an SMB looking to set up their data pipelines, the task may be overwhelming due to the lack of resources or knowledge.
For companies using Snowflake, an alternative exists just a few clicks away!
Nimbus Intelligence Connectors
Nimbus Intelligence has created a suite of connectors that, with less than 5 minutes of configuration, will ingest your source data into your Snowflake account at a schedule! More than 20 sources are already available in the Snowflake marketplace: Exact Online, Shopify, Personio, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central… A list of all available connectors can be found here.
How easy are they to set up? Well, this video shows really how easy it is.
Once you have set them up, you can stop worrying.
- Your data will be ingested in the target database of your choice
- Ingestion will take place at a schedule without extra costs
- Nimbus Intelligence will handle updates, fixes and maintenance, and will be able to help you out if any issues appear via support tickets.
Pricing
For starters, the Hubspot and the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central connectors are completely free. You can just install them from the marketplace, set them up, and have your data ingested at a schedule for free.
But, for the rest of the connectors available, how do they differentiate from other vendors? The answer is clear: This is a fully managed solution at <5% of the cost of other products. At only 10 cents per refresh + 5$ per million rows, the cost of the ingestion is will only be seen as an anecdote in your bill. Let’s see an example.
Say, for instance, that your business needs to ingest data from Personio every morning of a working day (that is already more than what 90% of the companies need in real life). Let’s also assume that your company is very dynamic, and you generate lots of new rows every day, e.g., up to 4000 rows per day.
Price per month ($) = ((5000 rows) * (5$ per 1M rows) + (0.1$ per ingestion)) * (5 days per week) * (4 weeks per month) = 2.40$ per month
That’s right, a fully managed ingestion solution, hosted right in your account, with refreshes every day for less than the price of a coffee a month.
Moreover, all connectors allow for a 7 day free-trial. You can simply go to the Marketplace from your Snowflake account, look for Nimbus Intelligence Connectors that you need, install them and try them out for 7 days. After the 7 day trial, if you do not explicitly select that you want to keep on using them, they will stop working and nothing is going to be charged in your account.
Security and Governance
Finally, I would like to address the important issue of security of your data. With many paid vendors, ingestion takes place using their own compute centers, which will fetch the data from the sources and then ingest them in the target database of the client. Therefore the data moves through a third party that is neither the source or the target database. This may produce issues with traceability or auditing in some cases.
Instead, with the Nimbus Intelligence Connectors you are sure that the data does not go to any third-parties, since the ingestion procedure is running directly in Snowflake. Therefore, your data travels straight from the sources, into Snowflake, and is loaded in the target database and schema of your choice.
Closing words
There are already many businesses that have trusted and been satisfied by the Nimbus Intelligence connectors. Noteworthy examples are a Dutch healthcare provider company, which is already using 3 of the Connectors in their daily data ingestion and a property management company ingesting their financial data daily via the Nimbus Intelligence Exact Online Connector.
The Nimbus Intelligence Connectors are a free/very cheap fully-managed alternative for ingestion available to all Snowflake users. They provide a free trial of 7 days and take less than 5 minutes to set up straight from your Snowflake Marketplace account. They may not be the perfect tool for every use case or company, but it is really easy to try them out and, if they end up being a good use case for your, you could be saving hundreds or even thousands of dollars monthly in your ingestion bill.
Links
- Nimbus Intelligence Connectors
- Nimbus Intelligence Connector Documentation and Guides
- Nimbus Intelligence Marketplace Provider
- Nimbus Intelligence
- Nimbus Intelligence Sales
