Hello. My name is James Ferguson.
I'm Aaron Dunder and I work for M&S.
At M&S, we do a lot of our own product development.
And that brings lots of challenges, such as availability,
what stock levels we have in store, what's on the road,
and what's in the distribution center.
M&S has its own data center,
but some of our systems are quite old
because we've been around for a long time.
The technology and the ways they were built,
they weren't really thinking about today's technology world.
Obviously that hits a lot of challenges
when you get to high volumes of data and its becoming
impossible to work in that way.
We've innovated over time to stay competitive,
towards getting information to our buyers, merchandisers,
store managers and the marketing teams.
We have to have a solution that gives us all our data
in a single place where it's available
to multiple different users in tools that suit them.
Azure Synapse is a great data warehouse platform.
It allows us to load instructional data
in a way that's really performant for reporting and queries.
We push data into Azure Data Lake.
We've surrounded that with ADF and Databricks
to do ETL pipelines.
That also gives us the ability to scale the platform
up and down, depending on workload.
We create labs and signups where they can pull together
their own datasets and then point tools
like Power BI at it.
So Azure has enabled us to stand up data science teams
and make them very efficient.
We have to make data-led decisions in order
to keep being a market leader.
You've got to make the most of machine learning
and other data science tools.
Azure is the only way that we're going to be able to do that.