M1 Connects Singapore Through the Data Cloud

M1’s mission is to drive transformation and innovation in Singapore's telecommunications landscape through cutting edge technology and made-to-measure offerings. 

Hi, my name is Danny Thien. I'm the Head of Data at M1. 

M1 was founded in 1997 and is Singapore's first digital network operator. Our company provides a broad range of communications services to both the corporate and the consumer population, ranging from prepaid to postpaid mobile to fibre broadband, OTT and gaming content and more. We currently serve over 2 million customers in the sunny island of Singapore.

As a leading telecommunications provider, it is critical that we continue to innovate, both for our customers and the business. Competition in the telecommunications industry has intensified immensely over the last decade, with MVNOs entering the market with very competitive pricing, leading to a general decline in average revenue per user. Hence there is a push to transform from a telco to a techco, a technology company delivering not just connectivity but also content. 

Data plays an essential role in M1 as it is the fundamental ingredient of all our decisions, be it in operations, sales and marketing, or strategic planning. Data flows in real time from our network infrastructure—our retail shops and online channels, and interactions with customer service—into our core data lake, which is built on Snowflake. Our users from the various departments, including the data team, tap on the data to develop reports, dashboards and our scientists develop models on top of that data to offer advanced analytics capabilities to our business. 

When we looked for a data platform solution, our foremost considerations were cost and scalability, security, ease of maintenance and support from the vendor. And Snowflake checked all of those boxes.

Prior to Snowflake, we had over 200 legacy databases, which created challenges not only just in terms of maintenance, but we couldn't trust the data sitting in silos and there was duplication and inconsistencies. The velocity of the data pipelines was also struggling to keep up with the business demands. Since deploying the Snowflake Data Cloud, we have been able to centralize our data assets and provide a single source of truth for the business to build reports, dashboards and advanced analytics capabilities.

Implementing a single source of truth enables us to deliver information and insights to our internal and external stakeholders in an efficient and trustworthy manner. Since 2020, our Snowflake Data Lake has grown 300 times, and today we support hundreds of users across business departments. 

The feedback from our stakeholders is that now we have a better ability to collaborate and co-create based on the centralized data assets that we have built. We are able to realize the mission of transformation and innovation, with Snowflake acting as the data backbone so we can make-to-measure our offerings to the customers. 

Our data strategy has enabled us to hyper-personalize the customer experience and better serve their needs through dynamic interactions and recommendations. Our relationship with Snowflake has been phenomenal and we look forward to continuing to build on that partnership.