As the country’s largest musical instrument retailer, the Guitar Center Company is no stranger to scale. But behind the scenes, its data landscape sang a different tune — fragmented tools, inconsistent governance, and limited access made it difficult for everyone to access trusted insights.
Under the leadership of Mike Doll, VP of Data, Guitar Center set out to unify their data and business strategy. By partnering with Omni, Mike and his team gave thousands of users governed data access while building the foundation for AI-powered insights to scale across the organization.
“Choosing Omni is solving for more than just BI. We’ve also primed ourselves to leap forward into AI because the semantic model is at the heart of the platform. That’s not true for many other tools.”Mike Doll, VP of Data
Results #
77% of users preferred Omni > Tableau during the POC — leading to the replacement of 150+ dashboards and full Tableau shutdown in under six months
Thousands of users on one platform: Unifying Tableau, Power BI, custom Excel, and MicroStrategy into Omni for stores, contact center, merchandising, executives, and all corporate teams
AI-ready semantic layer: Built a governed, context-rich foundation for AI-powered insights
Data Stack #
The Challenge #
When Mike joined Guitar Center, he inherited a fragmented BI landscape. “We had MicroStrategy, shadow Power BI setups, SSRS, custom scripts, and Tableau. None of it was governed, none of it agreed, and none of it had a strategy,” he said.
Tableau had been selected as the primary enterprise tool years prior, but the decision had lacked business input, and the implementation never took hold. “Fixing Tableau would have required a total rebuild and costly contract upgrades,” Mike explained. “It became clear that we needed a better option to improve governance, self-service, and overall value to the business.”
Their data warehouse setup was similarly painful. They were stuck between two insufficient options: a legacy on-prem instance and a low-adoption Redshift setup. To move forward, the team ran a bake-off and selected Snowflake for its performance, lower total cost of ownership, and tightly integrated platform.
The Evaluation #
With their decision to move to Snowflake, Mike kicked off a fast BI evaluation process to find a single platform that would consolidate tools, improve self-service, build trust, and complement Snowflake.
To ensure alignment between their business and data strategy, Mike included 50 people across the Guitar Center Company in the trial process. “We needed a strategic home for analytics. The key word for us was and still is unification,” he shared.
With the search committee in place, the business aligned on key criteria for a new tool:
Excel friendly
Easy administration to manage distribution & access for thousands of users
Governed self-service that improves trust
Unify use cases & reduce sprawl across tools
Data exploration methods that work for everyone
Fast & fresh performance & design
Semantic layer for governance at scale
After evaluating Tableau Cloud, Power BI, Sigma, and Hex, his team selected Omni. In addition to meeting all their criteria, Omni also stood out for its deep integration with Snowflake. “We picked Snowflake because it just worked the best, and we picked Omni because it gives us the structure we need to be successful at scale. And it turns out that same structure — the semantic layer — is what you need to be successful with AI, too,” Mike shared. “With the two platforms together, we’re setting ourselves up for the future, not just replacing what we had.”
While the data team led the selection process, they ensured this was an organizational-wide decision, with users across the business providing input at every stage.
“As we evaluated new tools, I ran our own survey to capture user feedback because I wanted the business to understand why we were making a certain choice. 77% of surveyed users preferred Omni over Tableau, and 91% rated it a good tool. We stacked the deck with Tableau users, and still got overwhelming support for Omni.”Mike Doll, VP of Data
In addition to quantitative feedback, users also shared their impressions of Omni via survey comments:
“Much better than current reporting systems. Very intuitive and easy to use. Much faster as well.”
“I definitely like Omni better than Tableau…and the fact that it strongly resembles Excel.”
“Really like the drill down data options and being able to use other queries as filters.”
The Migration #
In a collaborative effort alongside phData’s data & AI services, Guitar Center migrated 83 Tableau dashboards to Omni in the first 11 weeks to set themselves up for enterprise-wide reporting. Building on that momentum, the Guitar Center team continued the rollout, recreating more than 150 dashboards in total and fully shutting down Tableau within six months.
“It was a group effort,” Mike said. “I challenged everyone to have an innovative mindset. Just because we can migrate everything, doesn't mean we should. I want us to take advantage of features in Omni that are new to us and meet our needs even better than before.”
The migration of the rest of Guitar Center’s legacy tools is continuing with that same mindset, and the rollout to Guitar Center’s 300 retail stores began shortly after.
The Impact #
Tuning up self-service for thousands of users #
Omni now powers reporting and analysis for thousands of users across teams including stores, merchandising, finance, and the contact center.
“We’re making it easy for anyone to get what they need — without needing to ask a BI team to build it for them,” Mike shared.
Setting the tempo for AI #
Guitar Center is already seeing value from Omni‘s AI. A member of the call center team created a dashboard summary tile using AI-generated insights to help other users quickly interpret trends without combing through charts.
Mike and his team have also used AI helpers in Omni to speed up their workflows. “I use Omni’s AI helper within the workbook, and it gets you 80–90% of the way there. That’s a huge boost,” Mike said. “As we build out more curated datasets, I see Blobby becoming a powerful QA bot and a real assistant for dashboard builders.”
Keeping data in harmony with the business #
Governed Topics (curated datasets) ensure self-service and consistency at scale. Email distribution, embedding, and Excel-friendly exports have made it easy to reach users where they work — resulting in steadily growing active users.
As a next step, Mike is already planning new strategic initiatives to leverage AI more extensively. “We want to design trusted AI-driven user experiences that empower users up and down the organization, including executives,” he shares. “Now, we’re exploring how to utilize Omni’s semantic layer to unlock governed AI use cases in other applications.”
“I’m most excited that we chose the right foundation with Omni and Snowflake. We’ve set ourselves up to succeed in BI and be ready for what’s next — because good semantics are essential for AI. I don’t care where the logic lives, in Omni or Snowflake, as long as we can move between them and unlock value. And since people are already in Omni, it’ll be the front door most of the time. One lesson I’ve learned: the more you create a one-stop shop for data, the easier life gets as a data leader.”Mike Doll, VP of Data