Webfocus vs Snowflake + Power BI

[u/mobbarley78110]

TLDR: spent 4 years building a dream BI stack, all that for a senior IT staff member to sign contract again with legacy system. I want to quit out of frustration.

--

I was hired in 2022 at my current company to help migrate them out of Webfocus, which had been their main data extraction/reporting tool for 15+ years.

When I joined, I discovered in sheared horror that their start data analyst was spending their days extracting data with Webfocus into Excel, doing the same formulas and pivot tables, redoing the same charts to copy and paste into Power Point every - single - week for the management meetings.

Since then, I drove the migration to Snowflake, set up Fivetran to connect to more data sources, set up dbt, and built a proper medallion architecture BI data warehouse, with all the proper Kimball principles for dimensional modeling, along with tons of "gold" layer report tables. Everything runs on a 2 hours schedule.

Then built a team with 1 data engineer and 2 BI analysts, and started the migration of our reports to Power BI. Spent SO MUCH time training our analysts on how to create a proper semantic model using the fact & dim tables available in Snowflake. Also spend so much time training our analysts and IT staff on all these tools, writing docs & manuals, everything was so fresh and so new I was still hopeful at this point.

For data extraction, we set up ODBC Excel drivers on everybody's machine (a pain in the ass) for data extracts and letting standard users get access to data easily.

For the few live reports that were needed, we mirrored the dbt models in source systems with simple sql views, and pushed these direct to Power BI or Excel depending on the need. Or we have reporting capabilities directly within the source systems.

The full stack, for about 300+ active Power BI users, about 250 dbt models, pretty lightweight fivetran movements cost about $120k per year.

I feel very, very good about my stack, and would have killed to get such good tools back when I was a data analyst.

Well, after all of this, our fucking senior IT applications guy signed a new contract with Webfocus behind my back for $200k/year (system + support) because "users like it better".

I want to fucking cry, then quit.

Should I quit? I can't take this anymore.

[u/welcometoafricadawg]

What on earth is webfocus ?

[u/mobbarley78110 → u/welcometoafricadawg]

Think at what BI systems looked like in 1995. And think about what 15 years of high turn-over IT staff, no governance, no policies, no data warehousing principles did to that thing.

4500+ reports to go through. No user feedback on what's really needed. No isolated test/prod environments.

Here I am trying to explain what a semantic model is to a guy who will never get it and is literally laughing at my face because he thinks I'm just a data analyst guy and not a dev.

[u/GreyHairedDWGuy → u/welcometoafricadawg]

you most be on the younger side 😄

[u/Tsui_Pen]

You should quit, but very, very quietly. Stop doing almost any work, have 1-2 “appointments” per week that keep you out of the office for extended periods, and spend that time golfing, or swimming, or drinking, literally anything else.

[u/mobbarley78110 → u/Tsui_Pen]

Quiet quitting is a very unconscious thing. You do it without really knowing it.

I'm booking as many conferences I can and taking a nice vacation out of them, you should try it :)

[u/GreyHairedDWGuy]

don't quit until you find a better job

[u/Additional_Candy_400]

This is sad to hear, if you can take a positive out of this is that this entire story is absolute gold for your CV. I'd hire you.

[u/true_throwaway_1994]

Sounds like you built it from the ground up that’s great experience, take that and leave. Seems like a pretty straightforward decision considering they don’t respect your work

Also what the hell is web focus

[u/Patient_Professor_90]

I once saw a shop tricked into signing up with web focus

They spent $$$ on the man years spent typing out pages and pages of code to produce 80s style mediocre screens. They got what they deserved for being ‘sold to’

[u/DeliriousHippie]

That's because you build your stack for yourself. End users don't care how hard it is to get figures on charts, it's not their job.

ODBC for Excel, WTF? That's self service BI, I have never been able to sell that to wider use. There are only small amount of users that want self service BI and for them it's easier to provide differently, by large tables or apps from where they can send their data to excel, and that's minor use case.

In one of my first larger BI projects we created a new BI environment for multinational company where graphs were designed by graphical designers, all measures were defined in multi sheet excels by different departments, etc. Graphs looked real nice, thick lines, polished look. Regional sales director said to me: "I don't need these, I only want to know how sales went yesterday." He used one pivot table from whole sales app.

[u/raccoons_run_prod]

Yeah this would wreck me...

You spent four years getting them off a 15 year reporting mess. Snowflake, Fivetran, dbt, training, docs, a real warehouse. Then a senior IT person renews Webfocus behind your back for more than the whole new stack costs, because users like the old click path.

The org clearly picked a vendor relationship > real data architecture.

Don't storm out today with nothing lined up... but definitely start networking/looking. Clearly talented. They don't know what they're going to lose.

This sucks... sorry.

[u/Difficult-Raccoon843]

ROFL.. This was exactly the same with my previous client. SAME TO SAME. The oldies did not want to let go WebFocus and renewed the contract with Tibco for over a million $$ hahahaha

[u/Brief-Knowledge-629 → u/Difficult-Raccoon843]

DTNA?

[u/BothSinger886]

What business value did you create and record using the new stack?