How Dialog Enterprise monetizes its data with Amazon QuickSight

This is a guest post by Eranda Adikari and Aloka Abeysirigunawardana from Dialog Enterprise.

In this post, we share how Dialog monetizes data using Amazon QuickSight, a unified, serverless business intelligence (BI) service enabling organizations to deliver data-driven insights to all users, and to set up dashboards and visualizations that let non-technical users interact with and explore the data. Dialog Enterprise stands at the forefront as Sri Lanka’s leading ICT Business solution provider, catering to a diverse clientele of over 4000 enterprises across the island. Our comprehensive suite of services spans converged connectivity, cloud & co-location, security, data analytics, and IoT, all tailored to meet the distinct needs of businesses, regardless of their scale.

One key avenue driving our commitment to customer success lies in our innovative Data Insight Unit, harnessing the wealth of generated data to offer data and analytics as an additional revenue stream. Our endeavor to provide comprehensive solutions extends to leveraging tools like Amazon QuickSight, empowering us to furnish cloud-based business intelligence tools, notably interactive dashboards, to our clients.

Turning data into a customer product

As a telecommunications provider, Dialog generates voluminous data about audiences and web traffic. Our Data Insight Unit provides access to that data and analysis as a service, providing insights into details like website and application performance and television audience behavior. The unit is responsible for conception, development, and delivery of data analysis products.

We enhance our own data with third-party data to provide highly actionable and precise insights. A few use cases include:

• TV Audience, a tool developed in QuickSight to monitor free-to-air and paid programming viewership, enriched with viewer statistics, insights, and trend information
• Market share comparisons
• Key performance indicator (KPI) comparisons such as YouTube users vs. potential YouTube users

The following screenshots show some examples of our QuickSight dashboards.

Customers pay a subscription fee to access our data and insights, and they expect the data to be easy to explore, secure, and highly available.

Each client we work with has different parameters and goals, so we needed to find a way to deliver the data and insights that meet their individual needs. We also needed data to be user-friendly, allowing non-technical users to understand and interact with the data without requiring IT resources or a data science background. That meant we needed a tool for creating interactive dashboards and intuitive visualizations.

We wanted to use a BI tool that met the following requirements:

• Able to connect data from various sources, including databases, data warehouses, and the cloud, and integrate with the AWS environment
• Pass dynamic parameters from the dashboard to the database so customers can filter and explore data
• A web solution with on-demand license expansion and creation for client users

QuickSight is the right fit for our needs

Data analysis rests on data preparation: cleaning, transforming, and structuring data. QuickSight does more than just deliver intuitive dashboards and visualizations; its dynamic parameter usage allows direct querying capabilities that elevate our data analysis offering.

Our data mostly lives in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). We use Amazon Athena, a serverless query service, as the base for querying large datasets in Amazon S3. QuickSight integrates with Athena to facilitate quick and interactive analysis for our users. Athena’s ad hoc querying capabilities let us extract valuable insights without the need for complex data preparation.

We also use Snowflake data warehouses. QuickSight is compatible with Snowflake, which allows us to seamlessly extract and explore data directly in its native environment without unnecessary movement and transformation. This ensures our customers get the freshest and most accurate data possible.

The tight integration of data sources with QuickSight dashboards allows us to deliver a refined and data-driven user experience.

“Amazon QuickSight’s versatility in sourcing data from Athena and Snowflake data warehouses has greatly enhanced our data analysis capabilities. This integration empowers us to extract insights from both structured and ad hoc data sources, facilitating well-informed decisions and driving actionable outcomes.”

— Aloka Abeysirigunawardana; Data Scientist, Data Insight Unit, Dialog Axiata PLC

What’s next

QuickSight, with its streamlined features and intuitive design, significantly reduces technical overhead. This user-friendly analytics tool minimizes the complexity traditionally associated with technical tasks, enabling users to navigate and derive insights with efficiency and ease. By optimizing the user experience and simplifying the technical aspects, QuickSight enhances productivity and empowers users to focus more on deriving valuable insights rather than grappling with technical complexities. Customers were less exposed to technical difficulty in handling the tool and technical jargon.

Get started with QuickSight

QuickSight is a fully managed cloud service that makes it easy for us to offer sophisticated data stories to non-technical customer users. Its security, availability, and tight integration with the AWS ecosystem makes it effortless to package data services as an additional revenue stream. Its pay-for-what-you-use pricing model also makes it painless for us to scale and add new users new users without commitment. To learn more, visit Amazon QuickSight.

About the authors

Eranda Adikari is the Head of Data Insight Unit at Dialog Enterprise. Eranda is an experienced professional in analytics with a demonstrated history of working in the telecommunications industry. A strong research professional, he’s skilled in requirements analysis, management, project management, data science, and analytics.

Aloka Abeysirigunawardana is a Data Scientist, Data Insight Unit at Dialog Enterprise. As a Data Scientist at Dialog Axiata PLC, Aloka specializes in leveraging advanced analytics to extract meaningful insights from complex datasets. With a passion for transforming raw data into actionable intelligence, Aloka contributes to the development of innovative solutions and products. Their expertise includes data modeling, machine learning, and a commitment to driving data-driven decision-making within the telecommunications landscape.