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Google Cloud Platform > Case Studies > Looker + Kollective: Adding Value to Video Streaming

Looker + Kollective: Adding Value to Video Streaming

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Use Cases

Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Edge Computing & Edge Intelligence

Services

Data Science Services
Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

The Challenge

Kollective, a company that offers a cloud-based, smart peering video distribution platform, was facing challenges with its legacy system. The system was slow, inflexible, and incapable of delivering analytics that could unlock the full value of the massive amount of data generated from numerous sources such as grid servers, directory servers, APIs, Kafka Streams bin logs, with multiple data types including JSON. The company needed a solution that was flexible, fast, and scalable to meet the growing demands of its rapidly onboarding new customers. The legacy system was only capable of providing a retrospective on specific events that had occurred, but no real analytics. If a customer wanted to get any sort of custom metric out of it, a tech engineer could get back to them in six months.

About The Customer

Kollective is a company founded in 2000 that offers a cloud-based, smart peering video distribution platform. The platform leverages existing network infrastructure to deliver content faster, more reliably, and with less bandwidth. It scales existing IT infrastructure to accelerate content delivery to the edge of the enterprise while minimizing network congestion. Kollective's Enterprise Content Delivery Network (ECDN) makes it possible to stream live video and video on demand (VOD) to the edge of a company's network without affecting bandwidth or interfering with other critical applications. Kollective also offers Kollective IQ, an intelligent analytics platform. A component of their ECDN, Kollective IQ features an intuitive dashboard that lets customers instantly quantify the reach, performance, and quality of their video communications strategy.

The Solution

After extensive research and testing, Kollective decided to use MemSQL for the infrastructure and Looker for analytics. MemSQL is a database that can manage mixed workloads for both operational and analytic requirements, making it well suited for real-time applications. Looker's in-database architecture means that it would also offer speed. Looker offers easy-to-use self-service reporting and visualization tools for business users, along with a powerful yet flexible modeling language for use by data scientists. Both MemSQL and Looker are designed to scale, an essential feature for a rapidly growing company that is continuously expanding the amount of data as well as increasing its analytics requirements. With this robust new solution in place, Kollective was able to drive incremental revenue using analytics as a value-added service.

Operational Impact

Kollective was able to bring to market a product that told a much better story, one that got to the heart of what their customers were wanting to know in a much more useable, much more flexible, and much quicker way.
The solution was easy to deploy and integrate, which let the engineers develop an entirely new revenue stream in a mere nine months.
The help desk can see where those hotspots are and respond in real time.

Quantitative Benefit

Engineers were able to develop an entirely new revenue stream in a mere nine months.
With Looker, Kollective was seeing one to one-and-a-half second returns on data in the dashboard, which was like a factorial reduction in the time that it was taking to run queries.