Case Study: Spark New Zealand achieves 50% analyst productivity gain and 75% faster onboarding with Alation

Spark NZ uses Alation + Snowflake to gain faster, deeper insights from customer data

Spark New Zealand, the country’s largest telecommunications provider with about 2.5 million mobile subscribers, faced a fragmented data landscape—on‑prem Db2, a Hadoop data lake and other siloed systems—that left analysts spending most of their time searching for data and made scaling for 5G/IoT costly. Leadership decided to move to the cloud to better unify data and democratize access across the business.

Spark deployed the Alation Data Catalog together with Snowflake on Microsoft Azure, using Alation to surface metadata, prioritize which data to migrate, and make features reusable for analytics and ML. The combined solution cut time to find data by ~50%, sped onboarding of analysts and data scientists by 75%, accelerated Snowflake adoption, and set the stage to expand self‑service, governed analytics to as many as 500 users.

Spark

Peter Langham

Domain Chapter Lead – Data Engineering