RavenPack Shifts Analytics Service up a Gear with Amazon Athena

RavenPack improves the efficiency of big data querying for financial services clients, helping them make better decisions. The company provides news and text analytics services to organizations such as hedge funds and banks. It uses interactive serverless query service Amazon Athena to run customers’ analytics requests.

RavenPack provides a data analytics service to hedge funds and large financial services organizations, helping them discover new market opportunities or assess levels of risk for investments. The service takes unstructured data from 19,000 sources such as traditional news and social media and transforms it into structured data that’s easily analyzed.

From its inception in 2003 until 2014, RavenPack ran an on-premises infrastructure. Jose Luis Cruz Cañete, director of IT operations at RavenPack, says, “We knew moving to the cloud would help us deliver a more scalable, efficient data analytics service and give our customers faster insight to improve their business decisions.”

RavenPack chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) because of its “mature product set and roadmap” and migrated applications and databases to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). It created a data lake with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and used Amazon Redshift data warehouse for running queries.

“We needed a more powerful way to query this data without increasing IT management time. We ran a proof of concept and found that Amazon Athena was one-tenth of the cost of a competing query service. The competing service charges by the amount of uncompressed data, which wouldn’t be economical or sustainable for us,” says Jose Luis Cruz.

RavenPack started using Athena to run clients’ analytics requests in 2018. “At peak times—for instance, when markets open in New York—we can get hundreds of API calls simultaneously from clients. Athena handles them easily. We can serve double the data and provide 25 times more client requests,” says Jose Luis Cruz.

“Because Athena is serverless,” says Jose Luis Cruz, “it doesn’t matter how many API requests we get from customers—our analytics service stays highly responsive. Without Athena, we’d have to manage our own cluster using a query engine such as Presto. AWS gives us all the functionality without the hassle.”

He concludes, “Athena will be key as the business expands into new markets and we start to add data sources from countries like Japan and China.”

RavenPack’s chief technology officer Jason Cornez adds, “We benefit not only from the reliability and competitive pricing of AWS, but also from the relationship with our AWS account managers and solutions architects. They listen to our feedback and help us achieve success in the AWS Cloud.”