As Africa’s leading entertainment company, MultiChoice delivers Direct To Home (DTH), Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) and online video entertainment services through its entertainment platforms – DStv, GOtv, Showmax and DStv Now – to approximately 20 million subscribers across 50 countries in Africa. MultiChoice Group is the parent company of MultiChoice South Africa (including SuperSport, M-Net and DStv Media Sales), MultiChoice Africa Holdings, Showmax Africa and Irdeto.
Microsoft and MultiChoice have collaborated to deliver a ground-breaking project to setup Multichoice’s group-wide data and analytics environment to be agile, future-proof and scalable.
The benchmark project, putting MultiChoice among the top ten companies in the world in terms of deployments of Microsoft’s new Synapse technology, will take Multichoice analytics to the next level and give the group deeper insights, faster, to better serve millions of viewers.
Aspiring to extraordinary analytics capabilities
The project, codenamed ‘Vibranium’ for the fictional Wakanda metal with extraordinary abilities to absorb, store, manipulate and release large amounts of kinetic energy, sought to achieve the same power from data across the Multichoice group. The group, already mature in its data analytics strategy, was challenged in that it has numerous data and analytics teams working across the group’s businesses across Africa.
These teams used disparate data environments, many of them on-premise. It needed an agile and scalable, cloud-based single source of truth, with full governance and compliance that would not limit or slow the work of its autonomous analytics teams.
The company partnered with Microsoft to implement aspects of its enterprise data strategy across the group, including data management, modern data architecture, BI and advanced analytics and more modern ways of work.
MultiChoice sought to introduce DataOps with continuous integration and delivery, and it needed disparate data and analytics teams to quickly and independently develop new solutions and deploy them into production. Instead of taking a traditional layered approach, MultiChoice opted for a more agile approach in which solutions are delivered in slivers for immediate value, then expanded for incremental value.
MultiChoice wanted to adopt cloud in order to take advantage of new features and new technologies being made available, and so that it could easily scale, consume and adopt. Because it already had a trusted relationship with Microsoft and in-house Microsoft skills sets that the Group could leverage, it turned to Microsoft
Pushing Synapse to its limits
Azure Synapse Analytics, the limitless analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics, was identified as the ideal solution to MultiChoice’s needs. Delivering insights up to 14 times faster and for up to 94% less than other cloud providers, the solution addressed the MultiChoice Group’s top priorities: getting deeper insights, faster.
The project harnessed Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake, Azure DataBricks, Azure Synapse, Azure Machine Learning, Power BI and Azure DevOps to deliver on the group’s vision.
MultiChoice’s ambitions saw the group working closely with Microsoft project owners to push the capabilities of Synapse to its limits. As a cutting-edge Synapse project, Vibranium is among the first projects in the world to be privy to information about new Synapse features still in development, and able to develop its architecture with a view to utilizing those features in future.
Adoption was accelerated by using Microsoft Consulting Services, and MultiChoice had direct access to international Microsoft engineers for guidance and collaboration to ensure a well architected design and framework.
Rolled out during the early stages of the Covid-19 lockdown, the Vibranium project will continually evolve as technologies and demands change, reports MultiChoice. The new principles and systems required some upskilling in partnership with Microsoft, but the Group’s data analysts report that they are excited about the new tools at their disposal to deliver on MultiChoice’s requirements.
The Group is already benefiting from the ability to deliver deep insights faster, with a new ability to develop incrementally instead of waiting months for a solution.
Positioned to run on data & analytics
By integrating data from across the group, MultiChoice has built a data and analytics community supported by information in a single place that is a single version of the truth.
Teams can now tap into additional information they previously did not have access to, or didn’t know was available, thus providing deeper insights.
The project is also supporting synergising, with data and analytics teams building on each-other’s work and developing far richer solutions for the organisation. In addition, standardised principles and governance are now applied across the group to ensure data is managed appropriately.
The MultiChoice Group views the large-scale project as transformative in nature, delivering both a modern data platform and a more modern way of work, which will enable it to be more competitive and deliver more personal, relevant engagement and services for its viewers
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