Credit: Snowflake
Australian accounting software and business management platform MYOB has tapped into Snowflake and Dataiku to streamline its various datasets.
The 30-year-old company tapped into the technologies in order to gain better visibility, insights and discoverability from its various data sources.
Speaking during Snowflake’s Data Cloud World Tour in Sydney, Oliver Dwyer, head of analytics and data strategy at MYOB, said he was currently undertaking a process to ‘SaaS-ify’ the company’s operations and data management.
“As a 30-year-old start-up, we are weighed down by legacy systems, which is true of many organisations. Because of this, making sure the data is clean and usable is key,” he told an audience at Data Cloud World.
Credit: Oliver Dwyer “We are blessed with a very talented team. We have five data scientists, all at the PhD level, who are absolute geniuses. We are blessed with a really good data platform team, who are focused on making sure Snowflake is fit for use and making sure we have the right datasets.
“My team is specifically focused on transforming that raw data from Snowflake and visualising on top of that data to provide insights into the rest of the business.
“Having Snowflake allows us to shift a lot of that data, harness discoverability and have confidence in that data,” he added.
As well as Snowflake’s data management solutions, MYOB also started working with Dataiku six months ago on data science and artificial intelligence (AI).
In particular, the US-founded AI company was used to help overcome MYOB’s different data silos, with Dwyer claiming that “wrangling that data into a single dataset on which to build a model is extremely difficult”.
“Dataiku is like what Tableau has been for data visualisation,” he said. “Tableau enabled you to drag and drop your datasets in order to get that visualisation. Dataiku is on that same journey. It allowed us to remove the amount of code we needed to the point of no code.
“We have had Dataiku installed for six months now and have just unlocked our first data use case which will allow us to inform a lot of the operational decisions made with an algorithm.
“Dataiku has also helped us with data exploration. It sometimes helps us discover data; find insights from the data we have got. We use Dataiku and the library of algorithms within to answer some key questions. This requires highly complex algorithms to assess different verticals.”
“Measurement is key and that’s where the value comes in – when you can go deep into the data,” he added.
In August, MYOB acquired Greentree and MYOB Advanced practices of Melbourne-based Endeavour Solutions Australia and Perth-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) specialist Addax Business Solutions.
The acquisition deal saw Endeavour Solutions Australia’s team of ERP and business intelligence specialists and Addax Business Solutions’ team of ERP and business solutions consultants join MYOB’s enterprise division.
It has also acquired its long-time partner Australian workplace financial services platform Flare.
