Collect It, Store It, Prepare It & Serve It

Designing and implementing the right one for you

A performant and reliable business intelligence solution depends on a strong, extensible and future-proof data platform that caters for the whole of your data journey from collecting data, storing data, preparing data and serving data to your chosen business analytics and reporting tools.

There are many elements and considerations behind a successful and future-proof data platform solution. Our data platform consultants and Azure consultancy team have a wealth of experience in architecting and implementing Azure data platform solutions. They can help steer you in the right direction or manage your entire data platform project for you.

The high-level view of your data journey probably looks something like this:

Beneath this high-level view are many permutations of platform components and infrastructure choices and we pride ourselves in keeping up to date with the latest emerging technologies. (Have you heard about Microsoft Fabric?)

The data journey raises so many questions about what you should do, how you should do it and what platform you should use:

• Where will you store your gathered data?

• How will you get there?

• What tools will you need to cleanse and prepare your data for analysis?

• How will you turn your data into a business representation that presents the everyday language used throughout your organisation and provides a one-truth version of your key performance metrics?

• What toolset will you use to deliver the final reports and dashboards to enable you to achieve data-driven decision-making from the valuable insights retrieved from your integrated business data?

Here is an example of a complex data platform that can provide a centrally administered gateway to data, providing extended simple, secure and rapid access to a wide variety of data sets for different audiences, both internal and external.

This Azure data platform example will provide not just a central and standardised data hub, but will also provide:

• a consolidation of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data into a data lake

• ingestion of data into a structured data warehouse

• direct access to raw data in its native form

• a set of golden rules for managing the data lake

• a scalable solution that can be extended incrementally over time

• a platform for development in the areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science.

The Azure platform is continually evolving and offers many features, services and tools to contribute to a robust, futureproof data platform. You can find out more about key Azure Data Platform components such as Synapse Analytics, Serveless Pools, Dedicated SQL pools, Azure Data Factory and Azure Data Lake, and some of the supporting data integration tools such as Azure Synapse Data Link for Dataverse by speaking with one of our team.

With such a choice of deployment options available to you, it can be difficult to ensure that you architect the most effective, performant and future-proof solution for your business. Engaging with our Azure consultancy services will be a great way for you to get started with assessing your needs and determining possible solutions for you, along with suitable Azure learning paths for your team to put them in the best place to implement and support planned Azure data platform solutions.

How can PTR help?

Our data platform consultants have a wealth of experience across many industry sectors and many data platforms and have encountered most of the challenges you will be facing along your data journey. We have worked with integrating data from a wide range of systems including financial, sales, retail, supply chain, logistics, membership, project management, and across a wide variety of data platforms. We have also worked on data sets from very specialised industries and applications.

We can help you plan for a successful business intelligence solution by working with you to design a data platform that is tailored to your current and future needs. This may include:

• Audit and review of existing Data Estate

• Assessing the suitability of a Data Warehouse and subsequent design and implementation

• Requirements for separate enterprise-grade modelling platform

• Suitability of public cloud offerings

• Challenging existing data collection procedures

• Opportunities for further Data Consumers

• Data-driven workflow and process automation

• Requirements for Data Lake provision

• Possibilities with regard to Data Science and Machine Learning

Our Azure consultancy service can help you to get kick-started regard with an Azure data platform. We can help you understand the platform and the Azure topologies and services that are available to you to ensure you can achieve the optimum Data Platform solution and will guide you through a successful data journey with our data strategy consultancy service.

Building a Data Platform Solution - Where do you start?

Start by contacting PTR and we can take you through your options. We can assess your requirements and put together a per-day or project-based consultancy proposal to get you to where you need to be. You must see an early return on investment without committing to an extremely high budget and the best way to do that is to let us work with you to break your requirements down into manageable and affordable stages.

We are a big fan of Proof of Concepts (PoC) where we will work with you to choose an initial Business intelligence requirement that can be used to test the water and gain stakeholder confidence. A POC can help you to:

• Prove a chosen data platform architecture is fit for the purpose

• Educate and equip your team with the new skills they will need going forward

• Carry out sizing and capacity planning to assess the full cost and budget implications

• Provide a relatively quick set of results to demonstrate the potential Return on Investment and benefits of a strong

  Data Strategy

Following a successful PoC the full data analytics and business intelligence roadmap can be planned. By looking at the long-term goals we can pull out the key business processes that need to be brought into the data analytics solution, and in line with the data strategy can build the roadmap and timeline to start the journey.

It will be a journey, and the direction may from time to time change direction as business priorities change, but with a strong data Strategy, the right data platform and a well-thought-out roadmap these priority changes can easily be accommodated.

Equipping your team with the knowledge and skills they require, and building their confidence to implement a successful BI solution is key to a successful project so you may also want to consider complementing consultancy and mentoring with training.

Whatever your Data Source challenge our Data Analytics & Azure Consultancy team are here to help you. Call our consultancy team on 0118 979 4000 or email them for further information.