Analysing billions of rows with Amazon Redshift, Alteryx and TableauBy Adrian Loong

Business Intelligence Manager

3 Mar 2016

Note re data used in this presentation

• Please note that all data displayed in the dashboards is used to demonstrate AWS, Alteryx and Tableau’s capability and is

placeholder data, not actual amaysim data.

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Introduction

Business Challenges

Best of Breed products - AWS Redshift, Tableau & Alteryx

Learnings – one year on

About amaysim

amaysim is an Australian mobile virtual network

operator established in November 2010.

About me

Adrian Loong – Business Intelligence Manager

• Responsible for analytics strategy and execution across

Finance, Retail Sales, Marketing and HR

• Expertise:

• Decision support / Management consulting

• Visualisation, Financial analytics, Budgeting &

Forecasting

• CPA

.

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Introduction

Business Challenges

Best of Breed Products - AWS Redshift, Tableau & Alteryx

Learnings – One Year On

amaysim have a wide variety of data sources and a lot of data being generated daily

Wide variety of data sources A lot of data is generated daily

Source systems Databases

Phone callInternet

data trafficSMS

Over 10 billion rows of data with nearly 20 million rows added daily

Competition is intense in the mobile sector

Major carriers Mobile Virtual Network Operators

We only have a small team covering a wide span of functions

Retail Sales

Finance

Customer acquisition

HR

Photo Source: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/business-schools-not-first-port-of-call-for-managerial-recruits/2013863.article

Customer retention

Traditional tools are unable to keep up with speed of business demands. AWS Redshift, Tableau and Alteryx enable analysis within hours

Traditional BI: Keep calm and please wait

Analysis at the speed of business

VS

We need tools that empower us to analyse at the speed of thought

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Introduction

Business Challenges

Best of Breed Products - AWS Redshift, Tableau & Alteryx

Learnings – One Year On

Business Intelligence stack

Source DataIT

ELT/ETL

Data

Warehouse

Business

ETL

Visualizer

& Reporting

• ECC

• CRM• CSC

• Google analytics

• Sales POS• The list goes on…

• Alteryx desktop selected

and deployed• Gives our business the

agility we need

• Business driven rather than IT driven

• Ability to do predictive

analytics

• Tableau desktop & Server

selected and deployed• Self serve BI

• Business dashboarding

• Ability to do predictive analytics

Time to loadReliability of Data

Query performance

Flexibility for slice/dice Visualisation performance

Data definitions / governanceData exploration

• CDC used for real

time data replication• Slower to build

• More reliable

• Redshift selected for

reliability, processing power and scalability

Redshift gives us the speed and robustness to store and analyse vast volumes of data. Alteryx fuels Tableau visualisation allowing us to quickly gain insights in Tableau

Source

system

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Livechat

Source

system

2

Zendesk

Amazon Redshift

Datamart

External data /

Marketing data

Blend & enrich Visualization

• Clean the data• Apply business rules

• Validate business rules in teams

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Comments

Tableau can be used to directly visualise and analyse big data directly from

Redshift

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Alteryx can be used to blend data which is not in the Redshift database

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Alteryx can apply and validate more complex business rules before visualizing

outputs in Tableau

Continuously iterate between Alteryx and Tableau when discovering more data

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Alteryx enables us to combine different data sources in a visual workflow before visualisation in Tableau

Server

Source systems Databases

Servers

Workstations

Tableau is excellent for collaboration

Tableau server Tableau dashboards

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Introduction

Business Challenges

Best of Breed Products - AWS Redshift, Tableau & Alteryx

Learnings – One Year On

1. Democratise the opportunity

2. Make it relevant to different stakeholders

3. Cultural change takes time

thank you