In a matter of a day, Tableau Cloud enabled us to create the reports and then push them out across the organization and have different individuals in the organization connect to those reports online from any point in the world. It's extremely flexible. And from my perspective it's very cost-efficient.
Tableau: Can you tell us a little bit about what you do at Aeria Games?
Kirill Andriychuk, Business Intelligence Manager: Aeria Games is a gaming company that provides a portfolio of client games to our customers as well as recently we started to venture into the mobile gaming world as well. My role is to enable the company to have better access to information and to make smart, accurate decisions based on what the data is telling us about our products and about our markets.
Easily understood data supports faster, better decision-making. (All data sanitized in visualization examples)
Tableau: How are people in the company responding to seeing data visually? Are you seeing an impact?
Kirill: Just to give you a quick example, we were one evening sitting with the CEO of Aeria Games—his name is Pascal—and we were just throwing together some visualizations by country, seeing where our most profitable customers are.
And as we were doing it he said stop, stop, let's have a look at this. 'What's up in Singapore?' We have some really profitable customers, but we didn't know that before.
Seeing that kind of opened up absolutely new opportunities for our company, in terms of understanding where we should invest next and what markets we should expand into and what markets we need to still improve our performance.
Aeria Games mapped performance by market to identify new opportunities.
Tableau: It sounds like you're receiving a rather warm welcome!
Kirill: Deep down inside everybody is an analyst. With Tableau, they can go on this discovery path and find out new opportunities and better ways to deliver their products they're delivering, and better ways to monetize the customer, and also give the customer a better experience within our games.
Tableau: What is your favorite thing about our solution?
Kirill: My favorite thing about Tableau is by far the way it enables my team to deliver great stories through visualization. It delivers something that everybody can understand across the whole organization. You look at it and see the story that we're trying to tell.
Tableau: You've been using Tableau Cloud, our cloud-based solution. What has your experience been so far?
Kirill: We are big supporters of Tableau Cloud, because it enables us to focus on what we do best, which is designing analysis, designing reports, and then through Tableau Cloud to share it across our organization.
This way we don't really have to maintain any hardware or focus any resources on the infrastructure maintenance of the reports. So we create a report, we just push it into the cloud.
Tableau: Are you finding Tableau compatible with multiple data sources?
Kirill: We work with a proliferation of data sources starting from Hadoop down to Excel.
We also work a lot with cloud technologies like Amazon Redshift. I was very pleasantly surprised to know that Tableau can provide native connectivity to all those data sources, whether it's the CSV files that our IT team provides to us, to Excel sheets where our finance department likes to keep the budgets and the forecasts to a Hadoop cluster where we store our logs and where we store more granular data that doesn't yet fit into our data warehouse.
Tableau: How much data are you working with in Tableau?
Kirill: We like to keep our data warehouse small and agile. And as such our data warehouse is fairly small right now—it's under one terabyte. But overall we are working with data that exceeds 15 terabytes in size.
Tableau: Any tips for introducing Tableau to employees?
Kirill: The way we bring Tableau effectively within the company is first we allow users to discover it on their own—just to get them a little bit excited about it and also make them understand that you don't need a long learning curve to understand this tool.
Once they start becoming interested, those individuals that really want to learn the tool and make it part of their career, we send on the professional training that's provided by Tableau. When they come back they've become a Tableau expert that—like Jedis—can whip up any kind of dashboards in a matter of hours, or minutes, depending on the complexity of the dashboards.
Tableau: That's wonderful. Would you say that choosing Tableau has been a positive for your career?
Kirill: Championing this kind of tool throughout the organization had a very positive experience on my career, because bringing it in allowed me to connect people directly with the data and people love data