Offering the best content to customers thanks to Big Data
In a context of increased media competition, our client - the digital media department of a leading company in the Canadian media market - wanted to take advantage of their large amount of data to build a content recommendation engine for their users. To achieve this, a data architecture was required but the amount of data needed for the project was so great that Big Data tools had to be implemented.
Our mission: building a three level architecture
As a novice in Big Data and Cloud technologies, the client asked us to help them define the best Big Data architecture for this project. The complexity of the mandate laid in the multiplicity and diversity of data sources to be integrated for the tool’s development. Our mission was to suggest a triple architecture - solutions, technical, and business architecture - from an agnostic review of the different tools available on the market. In order to succeed we:
- Conducted a needs analysis with the teams involved in the project (business, IT, BI),
- Conducted a review of all the major Cloud tools, the various Big Data solutions as well as Big Data technologies “on demand” in order to put together several architectural recommendations for our client to make the final architecture choice.
The key to success : close collaboration with business lines
The technological architecture had to fit properly into the structure of the business model and could not be conceived with a silo approach. Thanks to close collaboration between our client’s business lines and our multidisciplinary experts, we were able to recommend a solution adptable to the present and future needs of all the business lines. In addition, the flexibility in our analyst’s approach and the support to scale the team really made a huge difference in the success of the project.
In a context of growing digital platforms, our client needed to modernize their digital tools to offer more accurate content to their users. Helping them to build the base of this transformation was an incredible challenge.
Benefits of this first Big Data project
This first mission was crucial to start this great Big Data project. It represented the foundations of the project. Notably, our project allowed our client to:
- Choose the most suitable Big Data tools for the present and future needs of the company.
- Deploy the required technologies for the recommendation engine,
- Implement Cloud best practices in the company,
- Develop the data-driven and Big Data culture in this large company that was not familiar with this new technological ecosystem.
Technological environment
- Azure
- Cloudera
- Snowflake
- Spark
- AWS
- Tableau
- SAP BO