Background

Half the world’s population still lacks access to the Internet and in many areas performance is still inconsistent. Access is critical for growing economies, starting new businesses, expanding access to healthcare, and providing educational opportunities. These issues impact everyone, and OneWeb is working to solve them.

OneWeb’s network is complex, made up of LEO satellites, network ground stations, an inter-connecting ground network and user terminals. To achieve best customer service with an optimally performing network requires constant
visibility of every aspect of operation. Insights and problems can only be solved by bringing data from multiple areas together. Technicians need ready access to data, and an ability to work directly with it themselves.

Solution: Why OneWeb Chose Snowflake

OneWeb asked Mphasis Datalytyx to recommend an architecture to achieve their goal of an internal shared data service. Datalytyx proposed Snowflake, the only data platform built for the cloud, which includes built-in workflow
for offering, requesting and approving data sharing across an organisation.

Separate Snowflake “tenants” were set up, one for each department. Data, sometimes at velocities in the billions of records per day, were brought into Snowflake using “DataOps for Snowflake”. This is a SAAS data processing tool
recommended by Snowflake which allows collaboration by agile development teams using DevOps techniques to create data pipelines.

Outcomes

The resultant “Self Service Data Hub” allows business experts to both supply and consume data for the benefit of their wider organisation. Said David Bath, OneWeb VP of Platforms, “Datalytyx, DataOps and Snowflake have got us
from vision to production in a frankly terrifyingly short time”.

Mphasis Datalytyx are providing skilled data engineers to accelerate the deployment of the platform and the data ingested into it. The business is then being shown how to access their data, and indeed share back enriched data sets. But fundamentally, the data hub is a self-service business tool which is helping us understand the operational complexities of the amazing network we are building.

David Bath comments: “data consumers are also producers; the supply chain becomes bi-directional. PowerPoint is not enough; if that’s the end result, you haven’t fed data back into the system. We’ve worked with the Mphasis Datalytyx team to help infuse our internal team with extra capability to empower our own domain knowledge; this has proven to be really successful in answering questions more quickly”.