Belden is a leading American manufacturer of electronic cabling and networking solutions across industrial, enterprise, and broadcast markets. The organization has been delivering data, audio, and video technology advancements for over 120 years, including the first television broadcast and support for the International Space Station.
Belden is in the business of innovation, and their marketing team is always looking for new ways to find an edge over the competition. To keep pace with modern business demands, Belden began growing their marketing tech stack, relying heavily on data to inform best practices in SEO, ad placement, and more.
But with each new cloud application and marketing platform introduced, it became more difficult and time-consuming for Paul Summitt, Belden Data & Analytics (D&A) IT Supervisor, to consolidate the data into easily digestible, comprehensive reports within Tableau for Belden’s marketing team to consume.
When marketing’s data sprawl began to overload his IT team, Summitt turned to CData Connect Cloud to centralize their marketing data sources and help them identify and amplify their most effective activities.
“Marketing’s requests started me off on a difficult mission to find a web-based connector that could do simple Tableau connections through our SaaS application logins… particularly for their most challenging ask: Pardot.”
– Paul Summitt, Belden D&A IT Supervisor
The Challenge: Increased Demand for Data with Limited Technical Resources
Before turning to CData Connect Cloud, Belden relied on Tableau’s built-in connectors to visualize and package reports. But the marketing team’s tech stack quickly outgrew Tableau’s native connectivity, and requests to visualize performance data across unsupported platforms flooded Belden’s IT queue.
The story is all too common: Marketing proposed that IT fill the gaps with custom-built connectors and feed all sources into a data warehouse, but Summitt’s team lacked the budget and bandwidth to support custom data pipelines.
“I knew that building and maintaining custom APIs internally was a full-time job. We simply don’t have a dedicated team of people to do that. That stuff changes all the time.”
– Paul Summitt, Belden D&A IT Supervisor
Summitt was already familiar with CData’s connectivity solutions after leveraging the CData HubSpot Driver for a different project.
“It was just easy – [the driver] didn’t require us to bring any data in-house, we could just do a pull from Tableau,” said Summitt. “So I already knew CData as a connectivity company that was doing everything that we need to do.”
Researching solutions for this project, Summitt discovered CData Connect Cloud, an intuitive Data Connectivity-as-a-Service hub that gives you access to all your data across hundreds of data sources and applications from one cloud-hosted location.
“I was having conversations with other vendors and their packages were pricier as they got into the nuts and bolts and I was just beating my head against the wall,” said Summitt. “I happened to see that Connect Cloud had just been released, which would give me of the connectors in one place. I saw it as a good sign to move forward with CData.”
CData Connect Cloud helped Summitt deliver Belden’s marketing data from Pardot, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Facebook Twitter, Instagram, and more in Tableau with just a few clicks – no installation or costly data warehousing involved.
The Solution: All Connections in One Place, No Time Lost
Summitt has only recently introduced CData Connect Cloud, but his team at Belden has already found the tool immensely valuable. After a short implementation process, Summitt can now quickly deliver Tableau dashboards containing relevant, measurable results for marketing, customer experience (CX), sales, and leadership teams.
Once the reports are built, Belden employees simply have to click ‘refresh’ on their dashboards to get a live look at all their data. For instance, Marketing can now look at spend across multiple channels to analyze how marketing efforts translate into web traffic and conversions.
“CData Connect Cloud connects our Tableau to Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Salesforce. Now we’ve also got connectors set up for Pardot, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. And I have all these things all in one place with no upkeep on my end.”
– Paul Summitt, Belden D&A IT Supervisor
Summitt sees the potential for CData Connect Cloud to benefit more line of business teams in the future – empowering everyone in the organization to become more data-driven.
“This is all new, being able to offer something like this to a marketing person where they don’t have to work very hard to get the data they want without relying on someone like me to drag it out,” said Summitt. “It’s going to be a huge success in my opinion.”
