Affini-Tech's Affordable and User-Friendly Big Data Analysis for Retailers with Google Cloud Platform
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Public Cloud
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
- Cement
- Retail
- Sales & Marketing
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
Affini-Tech, a France-based company, was founded with the primary goal of helping businesses make data-driven decisions. To achieve this, they needed to provide their customers with easy workflows and web-based interfaces for analyzing and managing Big Data at an affordable cost. However, they faced the challenge of finding a scalable solution for building applications and analyzing information. They initially explored several cloud vendors and even deployed storage on another large public cloud. But they needed a platform that was not only competitively priced but also developer-friendly and integrated for building complex applications.
Affini-Tech's customers are businesses across various industries that need to make data-driven decisions. They require easy workflows and web-based interfaces for analyzing and managing Big Data at a cost that makes sense for their businesses. Many of these customers are marketing companies that want to run their software on top of Affini-Tech's platform. They are used to spending more than $250,000 to build a data analytics platform. Many of them are already using Google Apps, and Affini-Tech integrates their data platforms into Google Apps, making these tools even easier to use and understand.
After trying and speaking with the Google Cloud Platform team, Affini-Tech decided to go all-in with Google. They found Google's pricing to be the most competitive and the platform to be the best for their developers. Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine, and Google BigQuery provided an integrated technology stack that worked better than anything else on the market. They used App Engine to build applications that help their customers control their data collections, model data sets, and filter and group data. These applications were sold to marketing companies that wanted to run their software on top of Affini-Tech's platform. Google Cloud Platform also helped them generate data findings at a faster rate by storing data in Google Cloud Storage, creating ephemeral Hadoop and Apache Spark clusters, and then pushing the data into BigQuery for analysis. This approach provided a more efficient, flexible, and cost-effective processing model than traditional static clusters.