- Hello, and welcome to Community Chats.
I'm Aley Hammer,
and today we're interviewing Richard Denning,
the director of software engineering from Isentia.
Richard, welcome to the show.
Can you start by sharing a little bit about Isentia?
- Yeah, sure.
So Isentia's a media-monitoring company
that helps empower our customers to make decisions
by monitoring, analyzing, creating actionable insights
for complex community across Asia-Pacific.
So basically what that means from a tech perspective
is each day we take in millions of media items,
from traditional media, which is broadcast, print,
new media which is online and social media,
we ingest those through our ETL-based cloud pipelines.
We then enrich them with machine learning
and natural language processing computation.
Then we put that together in a large dataset.
Once we have that large dataset, we're able to build
features for our customer use cases on top of that
such as delivering relevant content, identifying trends
alerting on important matters and getting a pulse
on what's happening in their media landscape
so clients can make the best decisions.
- Well, as someone who loves learning about what's happening
in the world from different sources of media, I think
that the work you do is so interesting and helpful
for so many consumers.
And Richard, I wanted to ask you why did Isentia decide
to utilize the cloud?
- So the decision was to move
to a cloud-based microservice architecture.
Basically, we needed to be scalable with robust up-times.
Monitoring the media has daily peaks and troughs,
so we needed to be able to scale up and down dynamically
our computation in a both reliable,
fast and affordable manner.
- Yeah, that makes complete sense.
Especially as you say, 'cause the media's always going
through peaks and troughs
when it comes to content being released.
And Richard, how has AWS actually helped you grow
your portfolio with your current customers?
- So having access to the AWS teams
as part of the enterprise support
has also given us access to stack specific SMEs.
And that helps our developers upskill when
there's new AWS technologies we're introducing.
This was really important recently when we grew too big
for Elasticsearch provider and we had to look for options.
We're able to move to an open search solution
in a two month period, which solved our stability problem
and we were able to leverage existing spend with AWS
for better pricing
which offset the development cost by switching over.
- Wow, two months, that's really impressive.
And Richard, moving on from this a little bit,
with the current industry challenge of attracting talent
which is really real right now on the market,
I wanted to ask, how does Isentia go about hiring
and also developing the talent that you have?
- Yeah, so look, I think it's really important to
have a mission for the development team.
And our mission is a transformational one at the moment.
We're moving to a scalable, simplified
microservices stack that is automated and scalable.
So basically this means
that the developers across the latest technologies
and are actively encouraged to keep learning
and bring new ideas in.
This is also paired with a strong sense of ownership
for each developer,
with everyone owning a part of the system.
So having a mission and be able to see the impact you have
on that mission encourages
and engages the teams to keep learning new skills
and sharing that with the rest of the team.
- Well, it's so great
that developers are encouraged to bring ideas
and have that sense of ownership.
And I 100% agree with you that having a mission
and being able to see the impact that you personally have
on that mission is really important.
So to round off this interview, what I wanted to ask you
is what's your top tip for creating like a cool,
fun working culture within your employees and your business?
- Okay, so my personal philosophy
for a great culture is the acronym MAGIC.
So letting the team know the meaning
of what they're building, giving the team the autonomy,
autonomy to come up with a solution and deliver it,
having a growth plan
to the team know that they're there for a career,
not just a job, and when that work is delivered,
making sure the team member can see the impact
of what they've done.
And finally, ensuring that the team member has a connection
with their squad, so they know
that everyone belongs, is respected, and contributes.
- Wow, I asked this question a lot
and I really love that answer.
I'm going to steal that.
So thank you so much.
MAGIC, I'll write that down and remember it.
Richard, thank you so much for coming on the show.
The relationship between AWS and Isentia
is a really important one.
And if anyone has any questions about Isentia
or how they use the cloud, please pop it
in the comment section below and we'll get back to you.
Thank you so much.