Docebo Adds Data Collaboration Features to Its Platform and Builds New Revenue Streams

Since 2005, Docebo has been building world-class SaaS technology, helping companies solve their learning challenges and drive their business forward. Starting as a learning management solution (LMS), Docebo has since grown to offer a complete suite of tools to help companies build, manage and optimize learning programs across all their internal and external audiences. 

But as Docebo’s customers became more sophisticated, they began to expect more from their learning solutions — and the analytics they offer. This meant Docebo needed to grow and expand its platform even further. “We’ve always had to ingest data from different sources to power learning programs,” says Laurent Balagué, product line manager at Docebo. “What’s changed is the maturity of learners. Our clients now want to analyze and communicate about learning performance in greater detail. And they want to integrate learning analytics into their own data ecosystem.”

Docebo was already using Snowflake’s platform to power its customer-facing analytics. But with the Data Cloud at the ready, Docebo has now expanded its analytics capabilities to meet rising customer demands, while maintaining control of its costs in a highly secure and governed environment.

In the past, Docebo faced latency challenges when working with large data sets. “With previous data lakes we used, we were seeing refresh times of up to two hours,” explains Marco Gatto, data architect at Docebo. “And for our biggest customers, their large data sources meant it could take up to four hours.” Beyond latency, Docebo’s legacy systems also prevented them from working with anything other than structured data. 

The other obstacle the company faced was its costly event-tracking solution, which made it difficult and expensive to get meaningful insights into how customers were using Docebo’s products. 

The move to Snowflake helped Docebo solve all of these challenges simultaneously. It offers a high-performance, flexible environment that reduces latency, streamlines data pipelines, accelerates product development and supports a new, custom, cost-effective tracking solution.

As a long-running Snowflake customer, it made sense for Docebo to work with Snowflake again to develop its new analytics features. Docebo has since launched a headless analytics product, Learn Data, and an embedded analytics tool based on AWS QuickSight that offers powerful dashboards directly in Docebo’s Learning Platform. But it wasn’t just a habit that kept the team working with Snowflake.

“Snowflake is very much in line with the performance profile we needed for our analytics,” Balagué says. “And it matches consumer expectations as well. It meets their needs for safety and performance, and customers trust Snowflake as a brand.”

Docebo’s teams trust Snowflake engineers to help them develop forward-thinking analytics features. “We have a great partnership with the team at Snowflake — particularly the sales engineers,” says Gatto. “We even had a few engineers come to our offices near Milan to help unblock our data lake implementation. Their knowledge of data integration and transport helped us see bottlenecks in our architecture and clear them to decrease latency and save costs.”

With all this support on hand, Docebo can quickly launch new features and products. Its recent data sharing features were deployed as a POC with target customers in just four weeks.

And Docebo has been able to maintain a tight control of its costs throughout. “We can see everything we’re spending at a granular level,” says Gatto. “With more advanced cost governance features at our fingertips, we can monitor each team’s cost to serve. That helps see who’s spending what, and easily spot changing costs trends across our products.”

Since it began using Snowflake’s Data Cloud, Docebo has been able to offer more granular analytics — to internal teams and its customers.

“We now use Snowflake for our data warehouse and data lake,” says Gatto. “But we can easily move data around in Snowpipe to and from our custom-built event tracking system. We use that to give a better understanding of how each product team is performing, which features are used more (and which less) by our customers, and which products aren’t performing well for them.”

This offers a wide variety of analytics possibilities for internal and external teams alike. Docebo teams can easily send data from Snowflake to Tableau to visualize course enrollment, offering product managers a clear view of course performance. And they can also track data in Jira to see if the number of issues tracked is trending up or down — offering valuable insights into how problems are being resolved.

“We’re planning to deploy new analytics features for customers as well,” says Gatto. “Currently, we offer them raw data on course performance. Soon, they’ll get new data marts, structures and fact tables so they can see insights and pre-aggregated data that might be more useful for them.”

And even before these features go live, customers still have access to embedded analytics in Docebo’s Learning Platform. “Customers get the best of both worlds,” says Gatto. “They get readable data embedded in the platform through our integration with AWS QuickSight, and also data sharing through Snowflake so they can bring data into their own analytics tools. The fact that AWS S3 and Snowflake use similar data structures makes it easy to use the two platforms together.”

Even while Docebo continues to expand its full suite of analytics products, it’s already seeing positive feedback from happy customers on some of their recent innovations. “We’ve had great feedback on our headless analytics products already,” Balagué says. “It works exactly as customers expect, and because Snowflake’s technology helps us move quickly, we can make fast improvements based on customer requests to keep them satisfied.”

Being able to share analytics insights with customers seamlessly also contributes to Docebo’s overall goal of turning learning management into a strategic business enabler for its customers. “All our customers want to integrate Docebo data with their own data systems,” Balagué says. “That way, learning becomes part of any other data analysis — and that means learning becomes part of the larger strategic picture.”

With other platforms, deploying new features means more work for teams onboarding customers. But Balagué has found the opposite with Snowflake: “It’s actually reduced the need for our data teams to intervene. With easier onboarding, we see quicker timelines for projects, and less hours spent getting customers up to speed.”

The team at Docebo has already met customer demand for analytics, and helped put learning on the strategic agenda. But it’s just getting started.

It has plans to deliver more analytics products for internal project and product managers while adding user-behavior details to bring more granular details to its product tracking solution. And, it’s expanding the capability and coverage of its headless analytics products. 

“We’re planning to enhance data governance across Docebo,” Gatto says. “We’re still planning exactly how this will look, but I know one thing: Snowflake will be an important part of this.”

Docebo is satisfied that its analytics products are in good hands. “Delivering great analytics is our ambition for the coming months and years,” Balagué says. “And with Snowflake at our side, we’re confident we can meet and exceed customer expectations in this area, and consolidate our leadership position in the market.”