Gaining Enhanced Analytics out of the Box Using ADA on AWS with Stax
Share
Overview
Business-to-business cloud-management platform Stax wanted to adopt a centralized data-management solution that would help it gain key analytics about its customers and how they use its product so that the Stax team could drive decision-making and improve the customer experience. However, the company lacked the engineering bandwidth to build an analytics solution of its own. Further, Stax was facing challenges with data siloes, as its teams used a combination of different data and analytics solutions, which increased the time spent on processing, preparing, and analyzing data.
To streamline its data into a single source of truth, Stax decided to centralize its data footprint on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and browsed the AWS Solutions Library, which offers vetted solutions and guidance for business and technical use cases. Stax, an AWS Partner, is native to AWS, and the company wanted to find an intuitive plug-and-play solution that it could use across all its teams. In 2022, Stax learned about Automated Data Analytics on AWS (ADA on AWS), which gives companies the ability to derive meaningful insights from data in a matter of minutes through a simple and intuitive user interface. Stax became an early adopter of this solution, beta testing the solution for 3 months. By using ADA on AWS, Stax validated that it could meet its security and compliance requirements, and it has saved months in implementation time. Additionally, the company can optimize compute costs while processing up to 3 TB of data daily from over 1,000 data sources.

Opportunity | Using ADA on AWS to Create a Single Source of Truth for the Stax Team
“In order for us to improve our decision-making, we needed to bring our data together so that we could build out a single view of the customer and identify where we need touch points in our customers’ journeys,” says Adam Beavis, managing director at Stax. Equally as important, Stax was looking for simple, out-of-the-box solutions that its teams could adopt without requiring them to have expertise in data management.
Stax began looking for ready-to-deploy solutions through the AWS Solutions Library, and in 2022, Stax discovered ADA on AWS—one of its offerings. The company learned that AWS was offering private previews for AWS Partners to pilot this new solution, and it took advantage of this opportunity.
"We can make better, more informed decisions about what products to build from the insights that we gain using Automated Data Analytics on AWS."
Adam Beavis
Managing Director, Stax
Solution | Piloting a Simple, Out-of-the-Box Data Analytics Solution to Drive Decision-Making
For 3 months, Stax underwent a beta testing period using ADA on AWS, processing 2–3 TB of data from thousands of data sources daily. Not only can Stax scale the solution to the demand of its data processing, but its teams found that ADA on AWS was simple to implement and use. “Because ADA on AWS was accessible and ready out of the box, it really shortened our time to value,” says Rowan Udell, solutions architect at Stax. “We were able to build up our understanding of the solution while experiencing immediate benefits.” Compared to building its own analytics solution from scratch, the company estimates that it saved 6–12 months of time on undifferentiated heavy lifting using ADA on AWS. “We can deliver up to 12 months of work in 1 week,” says Beavis. “That’s game changing.”
Additionally, Stax doesn’t have to implement its own governance or monitoring tools when it uses ADA on AWS. Instead, its teams can use the service’s built-in functionalities to quickly filter and enrich its data. Not only can Stax gain richer actionable insights about its software and customers, but its teams can view these analytics in one centralized dashboard. For instance, the company can track, visualize, and analyze user engagement and behavior, report on cost per customer, perform customer journey analyses, and more. “We can make better, more informed decisions about what products to build from the insights that we get using ADA on AWS,” says Beavis. “We’re hoping to reduce time to sale and customer velocity using this solution.”
Stax also benefited from the scalable, serverless foundations that underpin ADA on AWS. By quickly scaling to demand, the company can improve its overall operational efficiency while reducing overhead. “The solution is really tailored to our needs,” says Udell. “Rather than paying up front for licensing costs or other expenses, we pay only for our consumption.”
Outcome | Rolling Out ADA on AWS to Its Customers
Based on its experience testing ADA on AWS, Stax plans to connect more of its data sources to this solution. The company also plans a phase two, which will include offering ADA on AWS as a stand-alone software as a solution to other organizations that are looking for a safe, simple, and efficient way to kick off their own data analytics projects. “There’s a lot of value in having a solution that aligns with our company goals,” says Mark Wolfe, engineering lead at Stax. “Using ADA will provide us with the ability to focus on our core offerings and build up the pillar of value for our customers."