MYOB has built an analytics platform that consolidates all its data on Amazon Web Services, with the help of Melbourne-based DiUS, an AWS advanced consulting partner.
The accounting software vendor needed to reduce reliance on reporting teams and enable the whole business to process data for reporting, analytics, or reuse back into products. MYOB looked at a lot of software available on the market but found that none suited its needs.
"It was all very traditional; the way businesses handle data today is archaic," MYOB chief technical advisor Simon Raik-Allen told CRN.
Raik-Allen said he was looking for extra resources and DiUS sent a specialist to help kick start the project, which was for MYOB's internal business processes, not its 50-plus accounting products and services.
With DiUS' help, MYOB designed and developed a serverless data lake, based on AWS S3, and a processing engine, based on AWS' serverless compute service, Lambda.
Apache Spark was also integrated for Map Reduce capabilities. Amazon's NoSQL database service, DynamoDB, was the intermediate job lifecycle storage system.
A "data mart" was built on AWS Redshift to allow analysts and product managers to use their preferred data analytics tool and third-party services.
"An API was provided to open the data up to internal developers to enable them to upload data, build custom processing applications and enable two-way communication between the internal data platform and the external facing MYOB product platform.
"Over the top of the end-to-end system was layered automation, monitoring and metrics to ensure that everything that is expected to arrive and be processed is of the correct size and format, and is producing the expected results," according to DiUS.
There is a data security and access control layer in place to ensure that only users with the appropriate credentials can access the myriad data sources.
"The data team don’t know what is in the platform anymore, they just enable teams to put data in there. Each division is able to write its own analytics," Raik-Allen said. While data is centralised, control is not. Each team has control over the appropriate data.
"MYOB has been around for 25 years. We have a lot of data, we consumed and create a lot of data but we didn't have a centralised way to use it," Raik-Allen added.
He said the main goal was to give users easy access to the data, and to empower the organisation to use its own data.
MYOB already has relationships with multiple hosting providers, including Microsoft Azure and AWS. The company picks the platform that is more appropriate to each use case, Raik-Allen told CRN.
The company has no current plans to market this as a product.
MYOB has 1.2 million customers in Australia and New Zealand that use its more than 50 products and services. The company listed with the ASX in May 2015 in the biggest float of that year at the time of listing.
In the half-year ending 30 June, the company posted a revenue of $178 million, the equivalent to 11 percent growth. The number of online subscribers was up by 41 percent, with a total of 200,000 users, and the company saw an 8 percent growth in SME users to 570,000.
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