Business Challenge In 2016 multiple teams from the various media agencies merged to form Publicis Media. This merger revealed the need for a central data and analytics platform. "We wanted our agency teams to be able to mine data, but not to have to deal with the operational overhead of managing data infrastructure," explains Darren Smith, who leads the engineering and data teams. "Our intent was to democratize data." According to Smith, the team's existing data infrastructure "was a bunch of bespoke solutions" that combined AWS Redshift, large monolithic on-premise servers, and various unwieldy traditional technologies. Offering a central data and analytics platform would require both a complete overhaul of this infrastructure and some way to tie all of its pieces together. C

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