Petvisor scales data platform, achieves more with smaller team using Airbyte

Tech Stack

• Source(s): Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Salesforce, Google Analytics
• Destination(s): Snowflake
• ELT: Airbyte (migrated from Stitch/Talend), dbt Core
• BI: Tableau‍

Key Results

• Achieved operational efficiency equivalent to at least one FTE data engineer
• Reduced time to integrate new data sources from weeks or months to just days
• Successfully managing 20-25 data sources with plans to scale further
• Eliminated configuration blindness with full visibility into data pipelines
• Enabled rapid iteration for enterprise customer data requests‍

About Petvisor

Petvisor delivers a suite of mobile-enabled technologies into the hands of pet care professionals – helping them give their pet families the service they deserve. The company serves thousands of veterinary practice locations, from independent neighborhood clinics to sophisticated enterprise groups managing hundreds of facilities around the world – as PetDesk in North America, and as Vetstoria everywhere else.

At its core, Petvisor tackles the front-of-house challenges that veterinary practices face daily: appointment scheduling, client communications, reminders, and customer engagement. Petvisor also focuses on providing additional value for large enterprise veterinary groups, where corporate teams leverage data across entire clinic portfolios to drive operational excellence and marketing effectiveness.

Scaling challenges force evaluation of new data solutions

After three years building Petvisor's data platform, Sean Carver, Director of Data, found his team at a crossroads. Managing data from several SaaS product lines, spanning thousands of veterinary locations, each with custom databases, tables, and API services, was becoming increasingly complex.

"My team focuses on managing the data warehouse and ingesting data from all of our products. It's primarily our own unique product data, internally managed and defined by our software," Sean explained. With so much variety across their systems, maintaining reliable data pipelines was becoming a significant challenge.

The existing infrastructure, built on Stitch, and custom-coded solutions, was hitting its limits. Performance issues were only part of the problem. Petvisor wasn’t able to customize their connectors and see inside the pipeline to understand how the data was being moved. "With our current setup, the ability to configure the setup and the visibility into the pipelines was limited," Sean recalled. "We had to set it and forget it and just hoped that it worked, and if it didn’t, it was hard to fix it."

As Petvisor continued to grow, the risks compounded. The team faced mounting concerns about whether their infrastructure could scale with the business. But the breaking point came when their vendor  announced a major price increase on the contract renewal.

For Sean, the decision was clear: "We had doubts about our infrastructure before. It was definitely not worth it at double the price."

Detailed evaluation led Petvisor to choose an improved Airbyte platform

Sean's team had previously evaluated Airbyte's open-source offering, but didn’t feel it was right for their enterprise needs at the time. When forced to find a replacement platform, they revisited Airbyte and felt the product had matured significantly, with a new cloud-hosted solution.

"We like the visibility of the platform, we like the fact that it was open source, we like the tooling," Sean says. "The web UI alone was much more informative and useful than our previous solution."

Airbyte delivered on critical requirements:

• Microsoft SQL Server support: Their largest data source by volume
• Comprehensive connector coverage: Support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, Salesforce, Google Analytics, and more
• Configuration flexibility: Ability to adjust settings and monitor performance
• Cloud convenience: Managed service without self-hosting burden

They also chose Airbyte for its capacity based pricing model, which showed significantly reduced costs compared to alternatives that charged based on data volumes.

Enabling rapid data integration for enterprise customers

Petvisor's enterprise customers are sophisticated organizations that manage networks sometimes composed of hundreds of clinics. Unlike independent clinics, these networks employ dedicated marketing and operational teams who need visibility across their entire portfolio.

"These enterprise customers make up a significant portion of our business," Sean said. "They're looking behind the scenes and monitoring the performance and effectiveness of their entire portfolio, across our product lines."

These high-value customers frequently request new data insights, and Airbyte has transformed how quickly Sean's team can deliver. "When one of these enterprise customers or their executive teams comes to us, indicating 'we want to see this additional information,' and if we don’t yet have it in our data warehouse, we ask, does Airbyte have a connector for that? If so, yes, let's add it and start pulling that in."

The speed of implementation has been game-changing. What once took weeks or even months now happens in days. "We have the engineering resources and talent to build connectors on our own, but with our scaling business and data sources, that was a very daunting task.” Airbyte delivers value for Petvisor by taking away infrastructure headaches and allowing the data team to focus on uncovering insights for their customers.

Achieving more with a smaller team

The impact of Airbyte extends beyond speed. When asked if Airbyte enables them to achieve more with a smaller team, Sean was unequivocal: "Yes, 100%."

Without Airbyte, Petvisor would face significant challenges:

• Headcount requirements: "It would definitely require at least another data engineer, cost-wise."
• Expertise gaps: "The hardest part about hiring another employee is the amount of varying subject matter expertise that we would need in this individual. Airbyte takes away that challenge for us."

Sean highlighted specific Airbyte features that have transformed their operations:

• In-context documentation: "The documentation is very, very good at Airbyte, and is integrated there natively in the UI, especially when you're configuring data sources. That's helpful to make sure you have the right thing in the right place."
• AI-powered log analysis: "The new AI-assisted audit feature that scans through logs and explains it seems to be pretty effective. Before, logs were very cryptic—this feature makes it much easier to troubleshoot and debug."

These capabilities have fundamentally changed how the team operates, giving them the confidence to manage complex data integrations without expanding headcount.

More insights, less maintenance

Today, Petvisor confidently manages 20-25 data sources feeding into Snowflake, with capacity for more. Where once they worried about cascading failures and configuration mysteries, they now have a platform that scales with their ambitions.

"The real ROI is in our ability to iterate quickly," Sean explained. "Being able to iterate and adjust very quickly, and  just having the confidence in our ability to obtain new data is worth something, especially at our increasing scale."

This transformation means Sean's team can deliver in days what might’ve otherwise taken months. As enterprise veterinary groups demand increasingly sophisticated insights, Petvisor is ready.

"At the end of the day, you want a tool like that to just work," Sean reflected. "We can forget about it and know that it's configured and it's connecting and it's working. That hands-free capability is a big appeal for the platform.”