Maersk built their next generation data platform for unified analytics on Dremio making it the go-to place for end-user SQL queries in only six months

The Customer

Maersk is a global transportation and logistics company operating far beyond the shipping containers most people associate with their brand. The company manages a comprehensive logistics ecosystem including trucking operations, warehousing facilities, cargo airlines, and port operations worldwide. With such diverse operations spanning multiple continents, Maersk handles extraordinarily complex data scenarios where individual shipping containers might contain goods from multiple customers, each requiring detailed customs documentation, import paperwork, and tracking across their journey through the global supply chain.

The Challenge

Despite having access to vast amounts of operational data from their warehouses, aircraft, ships, trucks, internal systems, and port operations, Maersk faced a critical adoption problem with their initial data infrastructure. After following best practices and building what appeared to be a well-architected system, they discovered that users simply weren't engaging with the platform. For six months, the system experienced literally zero queries on some days, leaving the team questioning what had gone wrong.

The root cause became clear: reliability was fundamentally broken. The system suffered from hours of downtime every week, creating a user experience that drove people away from the platform entirely. Users would quickly abandon any system that couldn't deliver consistent performance, regardless of its other capabilities. This reliability crisis was compounded by the complexity of their data, where shipping containers split across multiple customers created intricate data relationships that required robust processing capabilities. The team realized they needed to completely rebuild their infrastructure to meet user expectations for reliability and performance.

The Solution

Maersk made the strategic decision to rebuild their entire data infrastructure using Dremio as their query engine foundation. They implemented a comprehensive three-layer architecture using bronze, silver, and gold data layers that could handle their complex logistics data at scale. The solution leveraged Dremio's integration capabilities to connect their diverse data sources while running within a Kubernetes environment that could scale up and down to optimize costs.

A critical component of their solution was standardizing on Apache Iceberg format through Dremio, which prevented vendor lock-in and eliminated the need to pay additional fees to access their own data. This open format approach aligned with Maersk's principle that organizations shouldn't have to pay proprietary vendors to access data they own. The team also implemented Apache Superset for dashboarding to reduce their Microsoft PowerBI costs while maintaining high performance.

The rebuilt architecture supported both direct SQL users and downstream applications, with seamless integration to PowerBI that eliminated the need for expensive Azure Analytics Services. By allowing Dremio to handle the heavy lifting of query processing and data management, Maersk could focus on delivering value to their users rather than maintaining complex infrastructure.