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Case Studies > BBM/Creative Media Works: Leveraging Google Cloud for Cost-Effective Innovation

BBM/Creative Media Works: Leveraging Google Cloud for Cost-Effective Innovation

Technology Category
  • Analytics & Modeling - Machine Learning
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
  • Cement
  • Construction & Infrastructure
Applicable Functions
  • Procurement
  • Product Research & Development
Use Cases
  • Construction Management
  • Vehicle-to-Infrastructure
Services
  • Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
  • Data Science Services
The Challenge

Creative Media Works, a division of Emtek, operates the global BBM consumer messaging and social networking platform under license from BlackBerry Limited. The platform has evolved from a text and video messaging app into a social ecosystem that unifies chat, social, commerce, content, and services. However, the company faced the challenge of intense competition and changing consumer expectations, making innovation, growth, and awareness of emerging trends essential to success. The company needed to evolve the text and video messaging app into a social service spanning chat, social, commerce, games, and more. Furthermore, the company had a hosting arrangement with BlackBerry for up to two years, after which it needed to identify a vendor to support its development work and cut over to them. The company determined that a hosted cloud environment should meet its agility, speed, and cost requirements.

About The Customer

Creative Media Works is a division of Emtek, Indonesia's largest media, content, and social networking business. The organization operates the global BBM consumer messaging and social networking platform under license from BlackBerry Limited. BBM has evolved from a text and video messaging app into a social ecosystem that unifies chat, social, commerce, content, and services such as news, games, video, bill and top-up payment, comics, shopping, travel, career, transport, coupons, and sports. Creative Media Works now operates as a standalone business with teams in Canada, Singapore, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, and South Africa.

The Solution

Creative Media Works selected Google Cloud Platform as it provided the widest range of high-quality technology and services, at a competitive cost. The company was particularly interested in the potential of Google Cloud Platform custom virtual machine instances to optimize its compute usage; its expertise in database management; and its logging and monitoring. The company engaged Google Cloud Premier Partner and Specialization Partner Pythian to help deliver the project. India-based CloudCover operated in a time zone that was user friendly for the BBM team in Indonesia. With assistance from the Google Professional Services team, CloudCover, and Pythian, Creative Media Works embarked on a project to migrate BBM for Android, iOS, and Windows into Google Cloud Platform data centers in Singapore and Taiwan. The business used Cloud Interconnect – a Google networking service – to link the BlackBerry data centers in North America to its data centers in Asia.

Operational Impact

  • The migration to Google Cloud Platform has delivered immediate benefits to Creative Media Works. The organization now runs BBM for iOS and Android in a highly efficient Google Cloud Platform architecture. The global presence of Google Cloud Platform and its load balancing service has enabled the business to centralize its infrastructure in select regions while continuing to provide a low-latency experience for the global BBM subscriber base. The Cloud Pub/Sub messaging service gathers and forwards all events to the Creative Media Works ecosystem, while Cloud Dataflow enables the business to rely on a single cloud-based managed service for batch and stream processing. This allows the business to perform more frequent analysis to guide product development, feature testing, and the creation of more intelligent user-facing features.

Quantitative Benefit

  • Reduced infrastructure costs by 30% for messaging and social app

  • Captures and visualizes 1 petabyte of log data per month

  • Manages millions of requests per second

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The Zenitaka Corporation ('Zenitaka') has two major business areas: its architectural business focuses on structures such as government buildings, office buildings, and commercial facilities, while its civil engineering business is targeted at structures such as tunnels, bridges and dams. Within these areas, there presented two issues that have always persisted in regard to the construction of mountain tunnels. These issues are 'improving safety" and "reducing energy consumption". Mountain tunnels construction requires a massive amount of electricity. This is because there are many kinds of electrical equipment being used day and night, including construction machinery, construction lighting, and ventilating fan. Despite this, the amount of power consumption is generally not tightly managed. In many cases, the exact amount of power consumption is only ascertained when the bill from the power company becomes available. Sometimes, corporations install demand-monitoring equipment to help curb the maximum power demanded. However, even in these cases, the devices only allow the total volume of power consumption to be ascertained, or they may issue warnings to prevent the contracted volume of power from being exceeded. In order to tackle the issue of reducing power consumption, it was first necessary to obtain an accurate breakdown of how much power was being used in each particular area. In other words, we needed to be able to visualize the amount of power being consumed. Safety, was also not being managed very rigorously. Even now, tunnel construction sites often use a 'name label' system for managing entry into the work site. Specifically, red labels with white reverse sides that bear the workers' names on both sides are displayed at the tunnel work site entrance. The workers themselves then flip the name label to the appropriate side when entering or exiting from the work site to indicate whether or not they are working inside the tunnel at any given time. If a worker forgets to flip his or her name label when entering or exiting from the tunnel, management cannot be performed effectively. In order to tackle the challenges mentioned above, Zenitaka decided to build a system that could improve the safety of tunnel construction as well as reduce the amount of power consumed. In other words, this new system would facilitate a clear picture of which workers were working in each location at the mountain tunnel construction site, as well as which processes were being carried out at those respective locations at any given time. The system would maintain the safety of all workers while also carefully controlling the electrical equipment to reduce unnecessary power consumption. Having decided on the concept, our next concern was whether there existed any kind of robust hardware that would not break down at the construction work site, that could move freely in response to changes in the working environment, and that could accurately detect workers and vehicles using radio frequency identification (RFID). Given that this system would involve many components that were new to Zenitaka, we decided to enlist the cooperation of E.I.Sol Co., Ltd. ('E.I.Sol') as our joint development partner, as they had provided us with a highly practical proposal.
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