In a world gone digital, and after a year where digital became king, it was incumbent on brands to connect, interact, and transact with their customers on a channel of their choice. Clickatell, a global leader in mobile communications and chat commerce, enables brands to connect effortlessly with customers through its enterprise-grade solutions. But what does that really mean for customers and how much choice do they really get?
“Our solutions ensure zero hold times and frictionless experiences from within the world’s most popular messaging and chat platforms. This has resulted in increased customer convenience and engagement while at the same time reducing cost and growing revenues,” says Jeppe Dorff, CTO, Clickatell.
Learning to swim in a sea of data
With multiple platforms comes an avalanche of data. Working with, and reporting on large volumes of data, was a technical challenge for the group. When Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched its Lake Formation, Clickatell realised how to solve the data dilemma. “We then compiled a project proposal, consulting with internal stakeholders to ensure we identified the key technical problems we wanted to solve,” Dorff explains.
Scalability is critical for the company, and AWS’s data lake enables Clickatell to store and analyse all its data from text, right through to its unstructured audio and video data.
“AWS continually consulted with us, and we could adopt and modify our passage into the data lake when it was required,” says Dorff. “Now, all our customer-facing product data, relevant for reporting and future use cases resides in the AWS’ data lake.”
Incorporating the data into Lake Formation began in November 2019, and as time progressed, the process evolved, enabling Clickatell to change its scope when necessary. “For the first phase, we focused on smaller data sets using the managed service within Lake Formation, meaning we did not have to build any infrastructure, which was a major benefit,” he points out.
Locked down but not out
The company initially planned to bring new talent into the company with the skills and experience with the AWS service. Then COVID-19 arrived, followed by the government lockdown, and Clickatell had to improvise.
They turned to AWS Training and Certification to upskill current members of their data and business intelligence team. The team attended a combination of foundational and specialist courses including AWS Technical Essentials and Big Data on AWS to build the required AWS Cloud fluency. These classroom courses were led by an AWS expert, which helped elevate the team’s expertise in creating secure, cost-effective big data environments leveraging AWS best practices.
By the third quarter of 2020, the company had ramped up its development, implementing the second phase of its project. They looked at how it could achieve high throughput data, a practical measure of actual packet delivery. Throughput is often an indicator of network performance because it will tell you if your network is slow or just hypothetically slow.
The AWS Glue that holds it all together
By the fourth quarter of 2020, Clickatell incorporated AWS Glue 2.0. This meant it was nearing the end of this project.
AWS Glue version 2.0 provides an upgraded infrastructure for running Apache Spark ETL (extract, transform, and load) jobs in AWS Glue with reduced start-up times. With the reduced wait times, data engineers can be more productive and increase their interactivity with AWS Glue. The reduced variance in job start times can help you meet or exceed your service level agreements of making data available for analytics.
A natural fit
“AWS was a natural choice because we already had an established relationship with them, and the technology was also a match,” Dorff enthuses. “AWS is also the industry leader when it comes to data technologies and services and has a variety of tools for managing and analysing data.”
Clickatell was able to consolidate its tools, platforms, and a lot of its infrastructure. It now uses on-demand infrastructure, making them more cost-efficient. Utilising the AWS cloud environment also enables it to use more of AWS’s services within the AWS ecosystem, like machine learning.
“We also launched a new customer portal allowing access to a single source of data,” Dorff adds. “An ongoing benefit for customers is enabling them to access their data and metrics more frequently. Customers now have more visibility on their usage of our products.” Simultaneously, this project is also an enabler for a lot of Clickatell’s internal reporting and analytics.
Lake Formation enables Clickatell to respond to new or specific requests in an efficient way. It enhances the company’s ability to implement new features and acquire new processes.
“We found AWS Lake Formation to be simple to implement and easy to use, and we are confident that AWS Lake Formation will continue to meet our requirements,” he concludes.
