By: Jason E Bacani

Follow @JEBacaniSQLDude
 
Welcome back to the latest installment of Tales from Consulting. In this series, I cover experiences, success stories, and lessons learned around consulting, specifically around experiences near and dear to me.

Last time I covered the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Before that, the topic was around development environments.

This time around I want to review our company, Key2 Consulting, and who we are from a consultant’s point of view.
 

 
Now the reason I wanted to cover this is because in recent past, I had the opportunity to join others on our consulting team when trying to engage a potential new customer. At that opening client engagement, I had to describe to a potential customer who we are as a company. It was actually an eye-opening experience for me.

I’ve been with Key2 Consulting almost 9 full years (9 awesome years in March 2020), but this was the first time I had to verbally discuss who company is and what Key2 Consulting offers. I mean, I knew I was a consultant in business intelligence (BI) and that I worked with SQL Server and other BI tools, but really, who is Key2 Consulting and what do we have to offer?
 

 
We can quickly look at the back of one of our business cards to get an answer:

• Data warehouse solutions
• Business intelligence solutions
• Custom application development

So what does this all mean? How do I relate this to a potential customer?
 

 

You get a data warehouse, and you get a data warehouse!

Key2 Consulting’s foundation from the late 2000’s has always been with data warehousing. A company generally has lots of sources of data, both internal and external to the daily operations. But ideally, that data ought to be synergized and harmonized so that relations can be built from that data. For example, invoice data ought to map back to customer data. Adding a new customer due to a new invoice record in the records table would generate a new record entry to the customer table.

Expand upon this principle to myriad tables and potentially several databases and even servers. How can this data be maintained? How can data integrity be supported? How can the data be stored, protected, archived, and the like? Key2 Consulting has that proven expertise to provide the answers and solutions.
 

 

We are smart in BI!

Solutions are offered using BI solutions. While Key2 Consulting is a Gold level Microsoft Partner, our offerings and practices are not bound to one proprietary technology. Additionally, data integration and reporting solutions are not bound by traditional on-premise means.

Navigating the cloud, or even adopting a hybrid approach to BI, is not uncommon today, and is definitely within Key2 Consulting’s wheelhouse. And if we’re talking scale, the experience around managing BI solutions spans from under a million records to petabytes of data, distributed and integrated 24-7.
 

 

Customers’ needs are not all alike!

And our solutions are custom. It is often said at Key2 Consulting that we offer a boutique or even a bespoke approach when partnering with our customers and clients. Each and every one our valued customers have specific needs and goals. One solution does not apply to all, and we hear, feel, and attentively address our customer’s needs.

In that partnership, a tailor-made solution is delivered: one that often accounts for immediate needs as well as for future data growth demands and challenges. And the solution offered is not delivered as a black box. Once delivered, the solution can be maintained by the customer, or an evolving partnership can be established and maintained to improve and guard against new and ever-changing data challenges.
 

 

Unlock the power of your data!

If we go back to the home page of Key2Consulting.com, we see the above welcome banner, mirroring our business cards. Yes, it is our company’s mantra, our mission statement, our goal in helping our customers make the most of their data. Data itself has little meaning. But converting that data into information that is organized, managed, consistent, and therefore actionable, is the result of our company’s efforts, and if this is what your company needs, then please reach out to us!
 

Questions?

Thanks for reading. We hope you found this blog post to be useful. Do let us know if you have any questions or topic ideas related to BI, analytics, the cloud, machine learning, SQL Server, Star Wars, or anything else of the like that you’d like us to write about. Simply leave us a comment below, and we’ll see what we can do!
 

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