Migration to AWS—Data Analytics and Visualization

The Challenge and Why AWS

Sound Partner Marketing specializes in performance-based marketing, which enables companies to pay for the performance of an online advertisement—based on how often it’s viewed or clicked or if it actually generates a lead or sale. The company was new to building on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and chose AWS because of their ability to provide a fast, cloud-powered business analytics solutions.

“AWS makes it easier for us to meet the high demand in helping online advertisers grow their performance-based partnerships,” said Jeremy Curtis, founder and CEO of Sound Partner Marketing.

SPM approached 1Strategy, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, because they wanted to establish a solid foundation to build on in the future.

“Because of their in-depth knowledge of and expertise with AWS, 1Strategy was an ideal choice for empowering SPM to leverage the strengths of AWS quickly,” said Curtis.

The Benefits

In a two-week period, 1Strategy set up Sound Partner Marketing’s AWS account for data repositories, which included the following:

• Set up and configure landing zone for data files in an Amazon S3 bucket, including appropriate permissions to secure customer data.
• Identify customer requirements for user access and configure appropriate AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users, groups and policies to enable Amazon QuickSight access.
• Configure and enable customer’s Amazon QuickSight access to data files stored in Amazon S3.
• Establish customer login IDs for partners and third-party access to visualization dashboard.
• Help to identify key values and create dashboards representing customer data.
• Identify how to address multiple customer logins and separation of data sets or dashboards.
• Provide education and training on how to import data and build Amazon QuickSight dashboards.

In addition, 1Strategy provided hands-on training and solutions using AWS QuickSight and Tableau—both are business intelligence services used to build visualizations and perform ad-hoc analysis. AWS QuickSight is able to help Sound Partner Marketing in building interactive visualizations on top of various data sources that are hosted on their AWS infrastructure.

“We also use Amazon QuickSight for its ability to report on data, and [it] is the only service that offers this functionality in the AWS ecosystem,” added Curtis.

Amazon QuickSight is cost-effective in that it provides 1GB of SPICE for the first user, free per month. SPICE is an acronym for Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine, and it uses a combination of columnar storage, in-memory technologies enabled through the latest hardware innovations, machine code generation and data compression to allow users to run interactive queries on large data sets and get rapid responses. Amazon QuickSight also comes with a built-in suggestion engine that provides Sound Partner Marketing with recommended visualizations based on the properties of the underlying data sets.

By migrating to AWS, Sound Partner Marketing has incorporated data analytics into their infrastructure while providing them with cost-effective, easy-to-build visualizations and interactive business intelligence the company needs.

“I can’t say enough good things about my experience in working with 1Strategy,” said Jeremy Curtis, founder and CEO of Sound Partner Marketing. “1Stategy is extremely knowledgeable of AWS and provided us their valuable assistance with business analytics as they guided us through our AWS migration.”