by Guillaume Jaudouin, Market Development Leader in Management- Altis Sydney
In the most recent episode of AWS Community Chats, our very own Market Development Leader in Management, Guillaume Jaudouin joined AWS’ Aley Hammer. He shares his tips to help you get started with data & analytics and provides insight into the upcoming trends in this space.
Watch the full interview below
Video Transcript
Aley: Hello and welcome to community chats. I am your host Aley Hammer and today we are joined with Guillaume Jaudouin of Altis. Guillaume, thank you so much for being here today, it’s great to have you on the show! Can you start by telling us about what Altis does?
Guillaume: Sure Aley, thanks for having me on the show!
Altis is a consulting company with a focus on Data and Analytics. We’ve been around for 22 years and our objective is to help our customers get business outcomes out of their data. We do this by following our ethos of “Connecting with courage, heart and insight” that led us to be selected Great Place to Work in Australia 10 years in a row.
We started having a strong focus on AWS in 2014 with the creation of a dedicated practice shortly after the AWS Sydney region was open. The practice has grown a lot over the last 6-7 years. During these years through the AWS practice, we’ve delivered data projects for around 40 AWS customers in ANZ and the UK.
Aley: As one of AWS’s leading Big Data and Analytics partners, you must see how things are shifting and changing in the industry, can you tell us about how the industry has evolved and how you’ve grown with that?
Guillaume: If we go back 7-10 years ago, most customers were building very structured data warehouses and ETL pipelines to support standard reporting. Then we got the explosion of data in terms of volume, variety of types and velocity of treatment. With that organizations started realizing that they needed to use data more efficiently to be successful and that’s where the industry realized that traditional data warehouses were not enough.
There has been a few waves of Hadoop based technologies, first-generation data lakes, but they were hard to implement. We’ve seen quite a few unsuccessful implementations… and that’s where cloud in general and AWS, in particular, have helped make that shift and embrace data and analytics.
Using AWS technology, it was easy to spin up a Spark cluster in minutes using EMR or query data in S3 buckets using Athena and Glue. Our AWS based data platforms were natively scalable and easy to expand functionally.
For us, it was a game-changer as it meant we would worry less about the technical aspects of the delivery and more about achieving tangible business outcomes for our customers.
Aley: It must be so exciting to help customers become more involved in Data and Analytics as the industry grows – so can you give us any hot tips on what the latest trends for the industry are?
Guillaume: The trend that we’ve observed for Data Engineering is now occurring in the Advanced Analytics space where it’s becoming easier for an organisation to start their AI/ML journey and within weeks they can prove the value of using ML via Sagemaker or applied AI services such Amazon Forecast or Personalize.
What’s around the corner as well is Industry 4.0 with increasing automation in production lines, supply chains and customer interactions. AI/ML is key to these automated machine-to-machine or human-to-machine interactions. Data is obviously at the center of Industry 4.0 and that’s an area of focus for companies such as Altis.
Aley: What useful insight into the upcoming trends in Data and Analytics. As an AWS partner your goal is to help customers seamlessly integrate data and analytics into their business, but what is it you do for customers beyond the technological side of things?
Guillaume: In our view technology is one of three pillars that support a successful data platform implementation. The other two are traditionally processes and people.
On the process front, we help with defining robust data governance framework and for the people side, data literacy is key and we offer training programs to ensure employees are adequately prepared to make the most of the organizations data.
Aley: It’s great to see how as a partner you are able to support customers so holistically! And on that note, can you give our viewers your best tip for those looking to start their data and analytics journey?
Guillaume: It would be to start with a business question or problem and see what data is available in the organization to respond to it. Once this is done, defining how the data is acquired, transformed and used to answer this question can be done during a relatively short POC.
To find out more about how our AWS Certified Architects, Developers & Managed Services consultants can help you on your journey in the cloud take a look at our AWS Practice Page.
