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IBM > Case Studies > Rapid big data analytics opens up new business opportunities

Rapid big data analytics opens up new business opportunities

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
Data Science Services

The Challenge

SolutionInc, a global leader in managing public Internet access in various public venues, realized that the data collected from its Wi-Fi network could provide valuable insights into user engagement. This data could help its clients make better design decisions, improve marketing, optimize staffing, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. However, to extract value from this data, SolutionInc needed a new analytics capability. The company needed to find new ways to identify patterns and spot trends in the massive amount of network activity data collected by its access points. To maximize the benefits, SolutionInc decided to harness next-generation big data technology.

About The Customer

SolutionInc is a global leader in managing public Internet access in various public venues such as hotels, restaurants, stores, convention centers, and airports. The company offers on-premise and cloud-based solutions to provide high-demand public Wi-Fi solutions, enhancing the overall customer experience. SolutionInc provides wireless Internet access services to businesses that operate public venues, with over one million touchpoints worldwide. Every time a customer’s device scans for Wi-Fi networks in one of these locations, the data is logged in SolutionInc’s systems, to help the company manage its equipment and monitor connection performance.

The Solution

SolutionInc collaborated with IBM's jStart team to leverage IBM’s managed Spark service, IBM Analytics for Apache Spark, to mine network activity data that reveals customer behavior as customers visit and move between different locations. The IBM jStart team set up a simple and accessible high-performance big data analytics environment using the managed Spark service on Bluemix. IBM Analytics for Apache Spark provides a reliable, elastic service to support SolutionInc’s big data. The team used a Jupyter Notebook to support an agile, iterative data exploration and analytics workflow. The Jupyter Notebook provides an easy-to-use, interactive computational environment that made it easy for the jStart team to explore data and present results in real time, via a standard web browser.

Operational Impact

SolutionInc and IBM were able to rapidly process 241 million database records without devoting the time and investment required to build a Spark cluster on-premise.
The collaboration with IBM enabled SolutionInc to gain a better understanding of customer behavior in various locations across a large city.
SolutionInc is now looking into new opportunities for value-added services and ways to scale its big data analytics up across its entire global access point network.

Quantitative Benefit