Case Study: IAC Publishing Labs achieves scalable, stable analytics and faster insights with Snowflake on AWS

IAC Publishing Labs Turns Data in to a Business Accelerator with Snowflake on AWS

IAC Publishing Labs, a digital media and incubator group supporting dozens of web properties, faced a brittle, on‑premises BI environment made up of an MPP warehouse and a Hadoop cluster that was inflexible, hard to change, and frequently unstable. The legacy system could not scale to meet growing data volumes or real‑time advertising and analytics needs—queries often crashed, data pipelines were slow, and the BI team's credibility suffered as they struggled to serve internal customers.

After a POC, the team migrated to Snowflake on AWS, retiring the legacy clusters and consolidating into a single, elastic data warehouse that queries native JSON, supports multiple virtual warehouses and cloning, and isolates workloads for predictable concurrency. In production in three months, the platform cut load times from every five hours to every 15 seconds, reduced processing from daily 3–4 hour windows to hourly runs of 5–10 minutes, extended data retention from six months to two years, supported 30+ concurrent analysts, and transformed the BI team from a cost center into a strategic, revenue‑enabling partner.

IAC Publishing Labs

Erika Bakse

Head of BI