Category: Data & Analytics

Embedded Analytics with Power BI – Part 2

February 23, 2021

by Samuel Ward-Riggs, Principal Consultant- Altis UK In Part 1 of this blog, we introduced Power BI Embedded, an Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that enables organisations to securely embed Power BI reports and dashboards within their apps, seamlessly blended with their corporate look and feel. Now, let’s dive into the details of …

Webinar: Altis Snowstream – Stream Data Ingestion for Snowflake

February 18, 2021

by Anandraj Jagadeesan – Principal Consultant, Andrew Li – Senior Consultant & Mike Setterberg – Senior Consultant Organisations, looking for speed, reliability, cost savings and security, are migrating their applications to the cloud. Naturally, the data platforms must take the same path and migrate to the cloud. Altis is a leader in helping organisations …

Embedded Analytics with Power BI – Part 1

February 15, 2021

by Samuel Ward-Riggs, Principal Consultant- Altis UK Data visualisation tools like Power BI, Qlik, and Tableau help us to visualise data to support decision making, but can we provide those same capabilities to our customers? Embedded visualisations place best-in-class analytics seamlessly within your application or website. Analysts within your organisation, rather than software engineers, …

AWS Community Chats With Altis

January 27, 2021

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 …

Can we follow Hans Rosling’s dynamic example using Power BI and when should we try?

January 8, 2021

By Roger Light, Data & Analytics Consultant, Altis UK Hans Rosling was renowned for his eye-catching and insightful presentations, using data visualisation as a tool to successfully promote awareness of world health and development issues. Wouldn’t it be great if we could make our own reports as compelling and memorable as his? Here we …

Effectively Delivering Data

December 9, 2020

by Andrew Bilsdon, Delivery Lead – Altis Sydney If you are involved in a data project, or the delivery of data as a service, this post is pitched at you. The recommendations are based on my 15 years of experience in data, information and analytics and are intentionally pragmatic. Self-service has arrived Unlike the …

Building an Azure Data Platform to Drive Performance in Air Traffic Management

December 2, 2020

by Chris Kearns, UK Regional Manager Air Navigation Solutions (ANSL) delivers air traffic control and engineering services at some of the world’s busiest and most complex airports including Gatwick and Edinburgh Airport. ANSL have access to many and varied data sources but have been limited to analysing this data through largely manual means. ANSL partnered …

How To Get Senior Leadership Alignment Around Data & Analytics

November 25, 2020

By Chris Kearns, Regional Manager – Altis UK Organisations have no shortage of data available from corporate systems such as Finance, HR, CRM, etc. but the challenge is bringing all this data together to support decision making. There are proven approaches for bringing such data together for use in reporting and analytics platforms but this …

Using Your Data to Make Insights

November 18, 2020

By Jason Williams, Delivery Lead – Altis Canberra It’s a common understanding across most organisations that data and analytics are valuable. Most organisations have large quantities of data available to them but don’t access and analyse that information effectively, either through having not collected or stored the information appropriately or the lack of technology and …

3 Keys to Data & Analytics Strategy Success

November 4, 2020

By Ben Atchison, Delivery Lead, Melbourne Altis has conducted in excess of 50 strategy and roadmap engagements across a wide range of industries and technologies. These 3 factors are important to getting your strategy right: Find a Trusted Partner Effective strategies unfold over the course of months and years, so it is important to think …

Power BI – The Road to Success: Part 4 (of 4)

October 28, 2020

by Ian Stuart, Principal Consultant – Altis UK In the first blog of this series, I covered the key steps that we need to focus on to ensure that usage of Power BI is effective in our organisations. In that blog I also delved into Training and Governance that provides the foundation for us to …

Cloud Cost Management: Altis Billing Dashboard

October 14, 2020

by Margaret Chan, Principal Consultant – Altis NZ Being able to track and forecast spending on the Cloud Platform is one major challenge in cost management today. While the cloud offers scalability, consumption-based payment model can be hard to keep a tab on. The most common way is to utilise the cost management portal …

Power BI – The Road to Success: Part 3 (of 4)

October 7, 2020

by Ian Stuart, Principal Consultant – Altis UK In the first blog of this series, I outlined the three key steps that we need to focus on to ensure that usage of Power BI is effective in our organisations. I then delved into Training and Governance that provides the foundation for us to get started …

Power BI – The Road to Success: Part 2 (of 4)

September 23, 2020

Data Platforms in a Nutshell

September 9, 2020

by Samuel Ward-Riggs, Managing Consultant – Altis UK We rely on information to do our jobs every day, information provided to us by Data Platforms. But what exactly is a Data Platform, and how does today’s information request turn into tomorrow’s KPI dashboard? Join me at the whiteboard to demystify Data Platforms and the jargon …

Power BI – The Road to Success: Part 1 (of 4)

September 2, 2020

by Ian Stuart, Principal Consultant – Altis UK We have been working with Power BI since it arrived on the market in 2015. Since then we’ve worked with a lot of organisations to help them successfully incorporate Power BI into their daily operations. We’ve distilled this experience into 3 key steps that are underpinned with …

How Data Literacy Can Benefit Your Organisation

August 26, 2020

by Jason Williams, Delivery Lead – Altis Canberra Since the start of COVID-19 organisations are beginning to realise the importance of data and will begin to consider how to utilise data available to them. As part of this, organisations need to ask themselves, do our staff have the necessary skillset to derive meaningful insights …

Power BI and COVID-19

August 5, 2020

by Gordon Sinclair, Managing Consultant – Altis Sydney A large proportion of the world’s population has been affected directly or indirectly from the spread of the coronavirus. Using data to monitor and manage the impact in my local context, was a clear benefit to me and to others. During the early stages of reporting on …

Growing A Better Cow On A Smarter Farm

July 22, 2020

by Andrew Bilsdon, Delivery Lead – Altis Sydney I had the great pleasure of visiting a friend in Northern Tasmania whose family are running a successful dairy farm in the beautiful Devonport region where the grass is green and rain plentiful. Being a desk-bound IT type, I was of little practical help so my …

An Introduction to Pragmatic Data Governance with Azure Data Catalog

July 15, 2020

by Dawie Kruger, Azure Practice Lead & Richard Roose, Principal Consultant – Altis Sydney In this webinar, we discuss how you can pragmatically kick start your Data Governance initiative using the Azure Data Catalog. Use this link to view the free webinar, or watch it below. As “Data Literacy” and Data & Analytics in organisations continues to mature, it’s becoming more …

Transform the Way You Build Your Modern-Day Data Analytics Platform with AWS

July 8, 2020

by Neha Kaul, Managing Consultant – Altis Sydney In this webinar, we discussed how you can transform the way you build your modern-day Data Analytics Platform using the Altis Automated Serverless Data Lake Framework. This webinar was attended by a large group who came from varying industries and roles. With a growing emphasis on delivering …

The Evolution of Power BI Dashboard in a Day (DIAD) During the Coronavirus Pandemic

June 19, 2020

by Ian Stuart, Principal Consultant – Altis UK Last year I wrote a blog that described the Power BI Dashboard In A Day (DIAD) programme and how organisations and individuals can benefit from attending this free training. The Coronavirus pandemic has brought about some changes to how the course is delivered, but the broad features …

Webinar: Accelerate Your Analytics Solution with Azure

June 17, 2020

by Mik Panchal, Managing Consultant & Manan Patel, Senior Consultant In this webinar, we discussed how you can accelerate your analytics solution with Azure using the Altis Azure Framework. With more and more emphasis on delivering data in Azure “Cloud” for analytics, there has been a big focus on automating this process in order to …

How To Validate Data Lake Files Using Azure Data Factory

June 10, 2020

by Garry Farrell, Managing Consultant- Altis Sydney Data lakes are very popular, and I have been helping to extend the framework we use with our clients. Our framework is an important starting point for discussions with our clients. It also doubles as a best practice design for the consultants to get the build done efficiently, …

Azure Data Factory (ADF): How to extract JSON data from an API to Azure SQL Server

June 3, 2020

by Mik Panchal, Managing Consultant- Altis Sydney This Blog is a step-by-step guide to build the integration pattern used to extract JSON data from an API using Azure Data Factory. Using an API to extract data in a JSON format has become a common method for extracting data into Azure SQL Database or Azure Blob. …

Power BI Desktop for the Business User

May 28, 2020

by Garry Farrell, Managing Consultant – Altis Sydney Do you have files that you would like to combine and develop into reports? I once worked with a client who was transforming and combining files, by hand, of different formats and structures. Her mission was to merge 7 files from 7 different financial institutions. So, it wasn’t a simple …

Has Worldometer Killed Data Visualisation?

May 20, 2020

by Andrew Bilsdon, Delivery Lead – Altis Sydney I am writing this in May 2020, as some countries are starting to relax the restrictions put in place to manage the pandemic we have been dealing with. I was motivated into writing this blog by a recent LinkedIn post. It received many comments and confirmed my …

How to Best Design a Data Lake Storage?

May 6, 2020

by Lynn Naing, Managing Consultant – Altis Sydney As Data Lake popularity grows, the common fundamental question we get asked from clients is ‘How to best design a Data Lake Storage?’. There is no silver bullet for ‘Best’ design as different clients have different requirements and use cases. However, there is a good common foundational …

What Do You Get When You Cross A Data Warehouse With A Data Lake?

April 29, 2020

by Kent Teague, Managing Consultant – Altis Melbourne Did you guess Data LakeHouse? And, no I’m not talking about the latest episode of Grand Designs. Although like Kevin McCloud in his quest to follow design projects from laying the foundation through to the building of dream homes. We’ll be looking at the foundation of the …

Transforming Delivery in a Distributed Team

April 15, 2020

by Andrew Li, Senior Consultant – Altis Sydney Agile & Scrum methodology has no doubt seen widespread adoption across software teams. However, many teams in areas like data and analytics have yet to catch onto this trend and its benefits. This post provides a brief case study of the benefits of the Agile approach at …

How To Connect Power BI to Read-only Replica of Azure SQL Database & More

March 18, 2020

by Nate Wang, Consultant – Altis Melbourne Using both Azure SQL Database and Power BI as Business Intelligence tools in your company? Then this easy, but often neglected, functionality might help you supercharge your reports’ performance with no additional cost. Sounds good? Read on! This blog post will cover: The background What is the Azure …

Tech Leadership

March 4, 2020

by Andrew Bilsdon, Delivery Lead – Altis Sydney I frequently engage with clients as a Tech Lead. My habit is to always clarify what is expected from me so that I am set up for success. Now the beauty to the role is that it is extremely flexible and broad, so not surprisingly so is …

The Importance of Data Governance

February 26, 2020

by Mythili Baker, Head of Innovation – Altis Sydney After attending the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in Sydney last week it’s clear that data governance isn’t going anywhere and it’s still a major challenge for organisations. The first main theme behind this I see is the growth of self-service. Tools such as Tableau, Qlik …

Hindsight Bias and IT Projects

February 19, 2020

by Andrew Bilsdon, Delivery Lead – Altis Sydney ‘Understanding of a situation or event only after it has happened or developed.’ So why would we bother writing a blog about this, how can we understand something before it happens? My thoughts are not related to the order in which we do things, I am going to …

Google Earth & Satellite Data

February 5, 2020

by Andrew Bilsdon, Delivery Lead – Altis Sydney Google Earth and the accompanying Earth Engine are a fantastic source of satellite data. Before starting, it will help to understand a little about satellite data and how it is shared. Firstly there are many satellites that are available to the public, a few examples include: European Space …

Learning About Project Delivery From a Chef

January 22, 2020

by Andrew Bilsdon, Delivery Lead – Altis Sydney I have the pleasure of working with a colleague who was a professional chef. He is humorous and keen to share his experiences with those of us who have time to chat. One day, we were discussing the latest reality show that involves chefs and young aspiring …

Data on the Balance Sheet

January 15, 2020

Andrew Bilsdon, Delivery Lead – Altis Sydney Let’s agree that the cliche of ‘data is an asset’ is not disputed, the question is really, how much of an asset. Before we go too far, some ground rules: The terms Data and Information are used interchangeably as is the case in general conversation, particularly with non-IT …

Data Visualisation Tips – Bullet Chart, an alternate to Gauge Chart

December 20, 2019

Mik Panchal, Managing Consultant – Altis Sydney Are you working on a dashboard containing Actuals vs. Budget KPIs? This post will discuss the use of a Bullet chart as an alternative to a Gauge chart by looking at the good and not-so-good aspects of each approach. Gauge Charts Gauge charts look great, but how effective …

Should we invest more time getting data into a Data Warehouse (DW) or analysing the data to create insights for the business?

December 12, 2019

Mik Panchal, Managing Consultant – Altis Sydney Are you implementing an Analytics solution using Azure and Power BI? Mik Panchal, our Sydney Managing Consultant, shares our recent success story using Microsoft Cloud infrastructure. This post will walk you through the benefits of using our Azure Framework and Power BI to provide robust self-service capabilities to …

Cost-effective XML storage and querying at scale

October 31, 2019

by Aleck Kulabukhov, Managing Consultant Sydney Introduction XML parsing is a compute-expensive exercise. XML is quite a popular way to store unstructured data so we often face a “Big XML Dilemma” – we can either: pre-parse XML, extract the required fields and store them in a most efficient and fast-to-query way (such as Data …

How to customise the axis in Power BI

September 4, 2019

by Phoebe Parker – Consultant, Altis Melbourne Recently, a client asked if it was possible to customise the axis on a line graph in Power BI, as there was no option for it in any menus. We did not want to change the chart type, as it was still the best way to visualise …

Tired of the hidden costs and limitations of your current RDBMS for Data & Analytics workloads?

July 24, 2019

Richard Roose, NSW Delivery Lead shares his views on where Snowflake fits into a Data and Analytics architecture. Whilst RDBMS’s have long been used for traditional transactional workloads (OLTP), the focus of this discussion is on their use for Data & Analytics workloads (OLAP). In a world of on-premise vs. on-premise cloud vs. …

Join the “tour de force” of AWS and Snowflake

July 18, 2019

To Data Lake, Data Hub, Data Warehouse is not the question. Which cloud platform to put your Snowflake instance on is the question – talk to Altis about the answer. For those contemplating re-architecting or greenfields data lakes/data hubs/data warehouses in a cloud environment, talk to Altis about why you should be considering the “tour …

I have Power BI, do I need a data warehouse?

June 5, 2019

By Kent Teague, Managing Consultant, Melbourne With the rapid spread of data visualisation tools like Power BI and Tableau, often outside of IT, Altis is commonly asked: is the data warehouse dead? Can’t I just grab the data and create my own reports? This article will talk to the continued importance of understanding the business …

Snowflake released on Azure in Australia!

May 30, 2019

by Dawie Kruger, Microsoft Azure Practice Lead It was great to attend the launch of Snowflake on Azure. Having implemented the Snowflake solution on AWS for more than 6 clients, it is great to see the addition of the Microsoft Azure infrastructure. For those of you wondering what Azure services are being utilized here is …

Passing GCP’s Professional Cloud Architect exam

May 14, 2019

By Margaret Chan – GCP Practice Lead, New Zealand Altis recently launched our new cloud practice focused on Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP) and as the NZ GCP Practice Lead I recently sat the Professional Cloud Architect exam. In this blog I will share my learnings and thoughts through the certification journey. Hopefully this will be …

Managing self-service BI teams

April 2, 2019

By Katrina Pilcher, RM and Mythili Baker, Head of Innovation Growth in the adoption of self-service BI tools and increasing data literacy across organisations is leading to an increase in the number of individuals across the business who want to and who have access to be able to perform their own analytics. …

Putting together a roadmap to guide your Data & Analytics journey

February 26, 2019

By Chris Kearns, Regional Manager, Altis UK Consider the following four scenarios and ask yourself which is closest to your organisation: Scenario 1: Your organisation relies on an army of people to manually create a mountain of spreadsheets/PowerPoint slides to provide information to support decision making. Different people create similar siloed reports that don’t …