Overview
Melco, one of the world’s largest casinos and integrated resort operators ($5B+ annual revenue), had adopted a “Customer 360″ initiative in which data from multiple customer touchpoints would be aggregated in a data warehouse to yield data-driven insights by analysts using Tableau and SAS. These insights would enable the company to tailor more targeted marketing initiatives that build loyalty and trust, and to increase company revenue and profitability.
SQL Server on Hadoop inadequate
The immediate choke point in the project was Melco’s legacy SQL Server data warehouse on top of a Hadoop-based data lake. Although Hadoop was valued as a low-cost, highly scalable storage tier, SQL Server was too slow to sustain concurrent users, and the more data ingested, the slower it got.
- Performance became unacceptably slow when concurrent users tried to access the same dataset.
- Data loads were not only slow but often subject to manual input, and massive data growth affected performance and scalability.
- Because so little data could be analyzed at once, marketing campaigns could build on only a couple months of customer history, blocking full monetization of seasonality.
- The sophistication of analytics was inadequate for supporting the Customer 360 project’s goals.
Modernizing the platform with Yellowbrick
After reviewing several providers, Melco chose Yellowbrick for its ability to transform the digital environment into a high-performance analytics powerhouse, while complementing Hadoop and existing tools and ensuring a smooth transition for end users.
Results Include:
- Loading of complex dashboards and analytic data structures now only took a few seconds instead of several minutes, with Yellowbrick providing headroom to add more concurrent users and easily scale to support user growth
- Faster access to new data, thanks to rapid ingestion and the ability to query new data immediately, so that analysts can work with the latest information
- 4X the historical data is available for analysis, allowing the company to build more targeted campaigns and monetize seasonality much more effectively
- Up to 300X faster queries, dramatically reducing the time to insight and accelerating the speed of decision making
