Cloud-based Big Data and Analytics Platform Helped hub.brussels Achieve Seamless Data Consolidation and Accessibility

hub.brussels is a leading agency based in Brussels-Capital Region. It focuses on supporting the Brussels economy by promoting the establishment of new businesses and improving town planning of districts. Also, hub.brussels has been supporting all the existing across districts in Brussels for many years. It partnered with Blazeclan with an aim to build a robust analytics tool that promotes building the next-generation shopping sector and installments of new shops.

The Need for Big Data and Analytics Platform

hub.brussels aimed at increasing their efficiency in the collection and display of data associated with Brussels entrepreneurship. By analysing and comparing all the data collected over the years, hub.brussels was looking to serve all businesses, tourists, and entrepreneurs in the Brussels Economy, while promoting establishment of the next-generation shopping sector.

The company partnered with Blazeclan for developing and deploying a robust big data & analytics tool, ‘analytics.brussels’. Blazeclan understood the requirements of hub.brussels and proposed that a cloud sustainable environment was the best solution.

Key focus areas in this project included

• A state of the art fully customized AWS cloud environment.
• A smooth addition of applications as the environment evolves.
• Ability to scale up for any future IT initiatives along with full integration.
• The implementation of value-add initiatives such as the use of BI and data warehousing to evaluate the success rate of realizing the objective.
• The capability of investigating, analyzing, and making sense of data by leveraging an intuitive UI.
• Developing unique capabilities to empower innovators via real-time data, B2B partnerships, and leveraging IoT as well as connected devices.
• Creating a data lake and building a data warehouse for critical data.
• Designing a custom portal that is easy to use by various users with different roles and skillsets

“By developing a custom cloud environment for hub.brussels, Blazeclan helped us to improve the way we monitor Brussels economy and the way we provide advices to companies located in the region. Blazeclan was a strong partner and helped us to understand our users concerns, suggested an adapted technical solution to fullfil them and developed this solution with a great project management.”

Juan Vazquez Parras, Head of Project Services - hub.brussels

The Solution

One of the solution involved the development and implementation of a web platform: analytics.brussels. This platform reviewed from the perspective of both user experience as well as the user interface. The review was carried out through direct involvement of various sectors including members of hub.brussels, business owners, and entrepreneurs. Experience of customers was adapted to address the need for the platform to welcome a greater customer base.

By creating a profile on analytics.brussels, the users achieved the capability to download raw data and access their personal environment wherein they were able to view the files shared with them or stored by them. The analytics.brussels platform collected all the data from visualizations and products created by the hub.brussels’ team. Tableau was also connected to the platform for linking the graphs and data across all products and visualizations. Visitors or non-signed users were provided with access to this platform without personal dashboard and authorization to download the data.

This state-of-the-art platform was made highly resilient and scalable with the use of microservices and DevSecOps tools, thereby enabling easy maintenance. The data lake helped hub.brussels’ team run exploration analysis on the data before running the ETL jobs and sending the data to the data warehouse. This further enabled the users to create products and add graphs, interactive dashboards, text files, images, and videos to make the information clearly understandable.

Benefits Achieved by the hub.brussels

Seamless Data Consolidation: The big data and analytics platform provided the customer with seamless data consolidation. It helped them simply consume the gathered data instantly as and when required.

Convenient Data Accessibility: The big data and analytics platform enabled convenient access to the data gathered, which further changed the culture within the organization as even the non-data oriented users were able to access the data easily. The platform was made highly dependable with updated dashboards that drive performance and deliver high-quality reports.

High Reliability: The platform delivered high reliability, as it offered simplified versions of the information on the web application. The data captured asynchronously is stored on the device and sent to the data lake for further processing and exploration.

Tech Stack