By using Amazon Redshift, FT is supporting the same business functions with costs that are 80 percent lower than before. Headcount has not increased, and queries run much faster.

In addition, the added speed means the business can conduct more comprehensive and sophisticated analyses as well as develop new solutions to drive revenue and readership. For example, FT developed its own web app that enables journalists to see, in real time, how their articles are performing and who’s reading them. This tool delivers data directly to the employees responsible for creating FT’s content.

Thanks to its data collection and analysis, FT can show that readers spend time on articles rather than quickly clicking on a page and then away from it. FT’s standard for viewability is five seconds, compared with the industry standard of half a second. “Our standard is 10 times higher, so you know that if an ad shows as viewable on FT, it was viewable,” O’Donovan says. These insights help FT demonstrate to advertisers the value of an ad on FT.com and drive revenue. Neither of these innovations were possible with the previous data warehouse because of its capacity restrictions and slower processing speeds.

Now that FT has eliminated capacity restrictions by migrating to Amazon Redshift, it doesn’t have to choose which business questions to explore, but instead, it can explore all of them. In addition, analysts can add more variables to queries to make them more statistically relevant. The business can spot and analyse opportunities, try solutions, and assess the results in close to real time. “Being able to explore near-real-time data improves our decision making massively. We can make decisions based on what’s happening now rather than what happened three or four days ago,” O’Donovan says. “Redshift is the engine that drives our decision-making: that’s how important it is to us.”