The Thinqi office has been a hive of activity over the last few weeks. As you might have read in our previous blog post, it’s been all hands on deck since we moved into our sleek new office in one of Swansea’s most sought-after tech business centres. We’ve welcomed a wealth of new talent to the team and also immersed ourselves in all things L&D at this year’s World of Learning show.
Now that we’re all settled in, we’ve wasted no time in welcoming partners, clients and customers into our brand-new meeting space. So it was a real pleasure for us to invite our friends at Amazon Web Services (AWS) here last week where Francisco Gonzales, AWS Solutions Architect, led an ‘Immersion Day’ into data lakes and reporting. He was accompanied by AWS Education Account Manager Kevin O’Brien and Partner Business Development Manager Dan White. Further to this, we also had the chance to present to the EMEA team as their ‘Voice of the Customer’ at the AWS office in Holborn (thank you, Kevin, Ksenia and Maria for the top-notch hospitality!). This was a wonderful opportunity for us to demonstrate how AWS helps us to deliver Thinqi, our learning management system (LMS), to millions of users worldwide.
A busy month for us indeed.
The Voice of the Customer
As Voice of the Customer, we explained in detail how the work of AWS plays a key role in Thinqi’s success. In our work with Ministries of Education, for example, AWS enables us to meet all types of demand 24/7. What this means is that we can easily scale our service to meet the needs of individual schools or entire nations, so users can access and experience high value digital teaching and learning without having to invest millions in traditional data centre infrastructure.
And as our international footprint grows, working in partnership with AWS is more crucial than ever. Our CEO Dan Sivak says, “It’s their interested, dynamic approach that enables us to provide such effective learning technologies at huge scale, and to diverse learner populations. As an ed tech software developer, we faithfully represent the challenges AWS services face with digital teaching and learning opportunities worldwide.”
As a fast-growing and innovative business with an ever-increasing number of users, we are now recognised as AWS ‘power users’.
But the day didn’t stop there. As you can see from the photograph of our CTO Darren Wallace and Head of Technology Nik Goile, our visit wasn’t complete without being treated to spectacular views of the Shard and St Paul’s!
Getting immersed in data lakes
The AWS Immersion Day was an invaluable opportunity to get an in-depth experience of AWS solutions and receive expert guidance from their solutions architects. Delving into the world of data lakes and analytics, this was a chance for our developers to ask questions and establish what actions to take with our big data and reporting strategy. This is of utmost importance as we focus on giving customers the insights they need to provide return on investment (ROI) of learning interventions.
“It was an engaging and valuable opportunity for us to be able to consult with their team,” says Senior Developer Gareth Thomas, who was present at the session. “Francisco did an excellent job of sharing his insight and experience in managing Big Data with the AWS tool set, which included AWS Glue, Athena and Quicksights. We are also grateful to Kev and Dan for their continued support.”
(We second that sentiment – thank you Kevin, Francisco and Dan for sharing such an impressive wealth of data know-how!)
In summary…
It’s thanks to the support of AWS that we are able to acquire the new analytics and reporting tools we need to help us continue to serve a growing number of global users. Our mission has always been to empower people with equal access to high quality learning opportunities and experiences. AWS enables us to succeed in this vision.
If you want to learn more about how this partnership has democratised educational access and experience for millions of students worldwide, you can find out more here. Our very own Nik Goile will be speaking as part of the AWS webinar, ‘Why EdTechs Innovate and Grow Using AWS’ on Tuesday, 29th October 2019 at 12pm (GMT).