Case Study: Presence Orb achieves near-real-time analytics and cost-efficient scalability with Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Wi-Fi analytics firm gains real-time benefits with Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Presence Orb is a London‑based Wi‑Fi analytics startup that captures smartphone probe requests across retail and entertainment venues to deliver footfall, dwell time, pathing, and other customer‑flow insights. As deployments grew to thousands of locations and more than 1.5 billion data points per month, their database approached capacity and nightly processing took about 24 hours, preventing real‑time reporting and threatening scalability and cost control.

Presence Orb migrated to Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse—moving archived data to Blob storage and importing live data with PolyBase—allowing storage and compute to be decoupled, scaled, and paused as needed. Two engineers completed the move in about three weeks; flexible DWU scaling cut compute costs (example: from 500 to 100 DWUs) and reduced processing time from 24 hours to roughly 90 minutes, enabling near‑real‑time dashboards and live occupancy views. Adding Azure Machine Learning produced 92–94% accurate footfall predictions to support staffing and stocking decisions.

Presence Orb