Biamp’s journey to AI- and ML-powered insight

Biamp is a leading provider of innovative, networked media systems that power the world's most sophisticated audiovisual installations. Founded in 1976 and headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, the company is recognized worldwide for delivering high-quality products backed by exceptional customer service. As a multisite, 24-hour operation with a growing acquisition strategy, Biamp needed to future-proof their data infrastructure and unlock enterprise business intelligence.

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Data silos threaten analytics maturity and AI ambitions

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As Biamp planned their migration from Microsoft Dynamics AX to Infor LN ERP, they faced a critical challenge: their established business intelligence capabilities, built around an on-premises ERP with Power BI and SQL Server, would no longer work with the move to cloud-hosted Infor solutions. This created operational obstacles:

• Data integration: Biamp needed the tools to integrate Infor ecosystem data with their analytics environment. Building custom pipelines for APIs with dozens of data objects would take months of development time, delaying time-to-insight.
• Risk to BI adoption: Biamp has a high-rate of Power BI adoption across their organization, particularly with sales teams. While some teams continue to use Infor Birst for embedded reporting, losing self-service Power BI reporting capabilities would disrupt established workflows across the business at-large.
• AI strategy roadblocks: Plans to leverage AI for customer insights, sales optimization, and predictive analytics required integrating complete data sources.

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"The opportunity I saw was we're coming to a hosted environment, we have data that's no longer going to be on-premise, you're not gonna be able to touch it. So, a lot of the BI and the data warehouse and capabilities that we've built internally were not going to be applicable," explains Mark Oakley, Enterprise Application Engineer at Biamp.

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This fragmentation threatened to undermine Biamp's analytics maturity and prevent them from achieving their vision of self-service capabilities and predictive analytics.

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Accelerating AI and analytics with Precog

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Working with StarPoint Technologies, an Infor analytics partner that helps companies maximize performance and streamline operations through data-driven initiatives, Biamp identified Precog as the solution to bridge the gap between Infor LN and their Microsoft analytics stack.

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“StarPoint Technologies is one of the value-added partners Infor brought in. They helped us understand the data lake and data objects as they pertain to LN and reporting.” - Mark Oakley, Biamp

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Chris Griffith, CEO of StarPoint Technologies, explains: "Precog is a pre-integrated, automated tool for helping Biamp move data out of the Infor ecosystem to get it better aligned with their data centers and our analytic and reporting strategy that’s more over in the Microsoft world. In our experience in working with Infor over the past seven years, when a customer isn’t going to fully standardize on Infor, Precog’s a necessary tool for for loading data. … and that's the fundamental value proposition Precog brings because Biamp has an analytic, reporting, and AI strategy that stretches beyond the Infor ecosystem."

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Precog delivered transformative benefits:

• Eliminated custom development: Replaced months of API integration development with point-and-click configuration. "We took that five days [of development work per table] and did it in five hours," says Oakley.
• Automated Change Data Capture (CDC): Built-in CDC capabilities ensured real-time data synchronization without custom coding. "Not having to worry about Change Data Capture was a moment of relief for me," notes Oakley.
• Preserved self-serve BI: Maintained Power BI capabilities for power users and teams, preventing disruption and protecting exceptional BI adoption.
• Accelerated time-to-value: Oakley estimates Precog reduced delivery timelines by 30-50% by eliminating the need to manually map schemas and build integrations.

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The solution supports Biamp's comprehensive data strategy—from operational ERP data to later development of AI-powered customer intelligence that identifies upsell opportunities and provides 360-degree customer understanding.

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The ROI: From weeks to hours

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Mark Oakley provided a tangible example of Precog's impact:

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"Let's say you've got an item table that has all of your items in it... One of the first things you're going to have to do is figure out what the schema is behind that item table and get it created. Once you get it created, you have to write the API to populate that table. Then you have to schedule that API...to be able to copy data from source to destination. All that's really realistic, but let's say just this one item table would probably take five days of work.

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Using Precog, we took that five days and did it in five hours.

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All we do is click the objects that we want to replicate. Precog does all the rest... Now let's say I've got 77 objects out there, and I would have to create a database table for each one with all the fields in it. And I’m sure there are tools out there to simplify it, but the short of it is that you still have to go out there, create it, write APIs, synchronize, test it, validate it."

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For Biamp's dozens of data objects, this time savings is significant, converting what would have been months of development into days of configuration.

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"I'm a continuous improvement guy, so my perspective is, 'If I can give you more time back in your day to do your job than before,'... that's a win." – Mark Oakley, Biamp

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Ready to unlock AI-powered insights and preserve your analytics investments during ERP migrations? Request a demo of Precog today.