Kantar optimizes internal customer app experience with Azure Integration Services

Kantar is one of the world’s leading marketing data and analytics businesses, using data and evidence to provide insights and actionable recommendations to a global clientele. The organization spun off from parent company WPP in 2019, with WPP retaining 40 percent ownership and another company, Bain, acquiring 60 percent. The change in ownership revealed some significant technological challenges facing Kantar. At the time, the newly independent organization had multiple divisions spread across 75 countries, each operating with its own IT infrastructure and legacy technology. The result was a fragmented internal IT landscape that was inefficient and had inconsistent security measures.

“WPP had purchased lots of companies over the years which became part of Kantar. As a result, we had various parts of the company using different techniques, programs, even technologies to move data around,” explains Tim Cullis, Director of Architecture, Group Services, at Kantar. “We had about 80 to 85 corporate applications, each independent of each other for historical reasons.”

Some teams used the same application, while others used different apps to achieve the same outcome or to continue a process. For example, completing a customer’s order might be done in various CRM platforms such as Salesforce, Sugar or Monday.com, or Maconomy, a financing platform. In all cases, the teams were siloed, meaning they had to find alternative ways to share internal and customer data with employees in other locations. This meant a great deal of effort was required to maintain data security standards.

“Without a common data transfer solution, we had to rely on email to securely send encrypted data across borders, which was less than ideal,” Cullis says. In addition, employees sometimes needed to rekey data from the spreadsheets into their own local applications. Not only was it inefficient, but it also increased the risk of introducing errors. For those processing customer orders, one mistake could mean having to start the entire process over.

Building a hub for internal activity 

To address these and other issues, the IT team began planning a single, centralized hub that would be available to employees worldwide. They visualized a service-oriented architecture that would provide high-level scalability, reliability, compliance, and data security. Two years later, they were ready to invite the first set of users to try out a new platform: the KantarHub.

One of the IT team’s core goals was simplicity. They decided the new KantarHub would be divided into functional domains based on the application category. For example, the first three domains focused on three distinct areas of business: HR, Legal, and Compliance. Next, the team would begin migrating all key applications and supporting apps from their localized silos into the centralized KantarHub. Once complete, employees worldwide would be able to access and work with data directly from the source—eliminating the need to send encrypted spreadsheets.

To achieve their vision, the Kantar team needed a highly secure, reliable, cloud-based solution that could scale to meet demand. Although the team had many cloud service options, the answer was obvious: Microsoft Azure.

“We use multiple cloud platforms, as you’d expect for a company our size, but Azure is the preferred strategic option for any development. So, we chose the Azure Stack to build the KantarHub. Now, we’re using all the key elements of the Azure Integration Services,” Cullis explains.

Once the platform was built, the IT team set to work migrating core applications and related apps to the appropriate domain. For example, Workday was assigned to HR, while Maconomy by Deltek was placed in the finance category, and so on. There were about 150 APIs represented by April 2024, a mere three years after the project began. There are many more to come as the team identifies and categorizes apps used by teams worldwide. Additional categories may also be on the horizon.

Greater reliability and uptime with Azure

Early response to the KantarHub has been positive. Employees appreciate that the platform is truly easy to navigate and use. Data can be pulled directly from the platform into working documents, eliminating duplicative work. There have also been hidden benefits that employees may not recognize but that have caught the attention of IT.

“I would say the biggest benefit from our point of view is reliability. There’s been no downtime, and we’ve never lost any data,” Cullis says. “Another one is security. Any data that we touch is highly encrypted by default. Even all our logging data is encrypted because it could contain PII or HR data. Our data was in spreadsheets and required more manual intervention to keep it secure. I would say Azure has made data security much easier for Kantar.”

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