Multichoice is a video entertainments company, we deliver content
to over 20 million subscribers across 50 countries.
So, we actually had a very mature data strategy in the past,
like a very big business intelligence department servicing the organisation.
Our strategy really has been to bring these communities together,
so that we can leverage all the various data assets that these different areas
have been housing and developing, so that we can learn and share
from each other, but also really exploit
the insights available to the organisation.
The brief from Multichoice was simplified to get them to a single source of truth,
and how we were going to leverage our technology to bring them closer to that.
We needed to create a new modern data platform for ourselves
that we know that would stand us in good stead
for the future and for time to come.
Create agility, partnership, how we bring additional skills to augment
to their team, how do we get them access
to additional resources and technologies? etcetera.
In the past we have had to create exercise jobs manually
or we use some automation software to do it.
In the cloud with ADF we can use metadata to automatically
create all the pipelines for us.
At the heart of that lies Azure Synapse Analytics, which is essentially
our cloud scale analytics tool, and this is our data warehouse reimagined
and so much more.
And Microsoft actually gave us straight access to the teams developing
these technologies so we can get insights into it.
We’ve engaged really important programs and teams within the Microsoft organisation,
being our Microsoft Consulting Services as well as our FastTrack program,
to augment onto this really, technically sound team that Multichoice has.
So we actually have insights around how the technologies work at it’s core.
How do we look at additional artificial intelligence use-cases,
that further the use of that data?
Take that analytics to the next level and provide the Multichoice team
with an opportunity to predict or react in a completely different way,
by using their data, so turning that data into something that’s an economy.
So some of the insights that we have gained from Microsoft allowed us
to really push our strategy to the next level, and this is having
multiple independent teams working in parallel.
So what this means is, (A) we remove duplication of effort
so we are now housing information in a single place
that’s a single version of the truth,
secondly teams can tap into additional information
that they didn’t have access to before or didn’t know was available,
thus obviously providing deeper insights to the organisation.
This can truly be seen as a benchmark project,
not just locally, but globally.
As time is evolving and teams are understanding the technology a lot better,
we can see the cadence of work increasing, it's getting faster and faster.
At this present time Multichoice is the largest
in-production deployment across South Africa and Africa.
We’ve set ourselves up to continuously evolve,
so as new business demand or business direction comes into play,
we are able to adapt and support the business with those insights,
but also as technologies are made available on the Azure platform
we can also incorporate these into our ways of work.
If we consider how Multichoice has adopted the technology,
They have really broken the ceiling
of what’s possible for analytics and data sciences.