www.talend.com ©Talend 2018 · EN

Creating a flexible, scalable digital marketing platform

“Talend has a high affinity with AWS, and a licencing system that is easy to scale out with infrastructure expansion.

CA S E S T U DY

INDUSTRY

• Hospitality/Leisure

INFORMATION• HQ: Japan

• 501 - 2,000 employees

USE CASE• Marketing efficiency

CHALLENGE• Reaching capacity

TALEND PRODUCT USED • Talend Big Data

PARTNER• Air Co., Ltd.

RESULTS

• Reduced jobs from 2,000 to 500

• Improved response times through proactive monitoring

• Reduced processing time and maintenance

”Tomoyuki Shiga, General Manager, Customer Experience Design Division, Golf Digest Online.

Established in 2000, Golf Digest Online is one of the largest golf internet portals in the world. The company offers a range of services including golfing news, video content, equipment sales, lessons, and course bookings. The portal has more than 3million members.

From its inception, Golf Digest Online has focused on continually growing its portfolio of member service. Data collected via the portal is used to identify new opportunities and create targeted advertising and promotional campaigns.

“Providing a compelling experience for our members is our primary goal,” said Tomoyuki Shiga, General Manager, Customer Experience Design Division at Golf Digest Online. “Making intelligent use of data is an important part of the process and underpins everything that we do.”

Reaching capacity To support its data-based marketing programs, in 2011 the company established an on-premise digital marketing infrastructure platform designed to manage customer data in an integrated manner. While the platform performed well initially, as data volumes and analysis requirements increased, it began to reach the limits of its processing capabilities.

“The type of data analysis we were undertaking was becoming increasingly sophisticated,” said Mr Shiga. “We could see that we needed to find an alternative that could meet our existing needs as well as provide support for future growth.”

Why Talend?After examining a range of options, a decision was taken in December 2017 to shift data storage and processing capabilities to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud where Amazon RedShift was adopted as a new data warehouse. Working with technology partner Air Co Ltd, Golf Digest Online designed new templates to improve data analysis efficiencies and minimise the risk of any problems arising in the future.

During the migration project, it was recognised new ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools would also be required to support the improved performance offered by the AWS platform. Following a rigorous assessment of alternatives, it was decided to deploy Talend Big Data.

‘Talend has a close affinity with AWS and an architecture and licencing system that is easy to scale out as our infrastructure expands,” said Mr Shiga. “Talend licencing is not CPU based but rather a developer user licence agreement, so our costs will not increase as we extend our system.”

Mr Shiga said that, as well as allowing the company to build systems on AWS EC2 instances, Talend offered dedicated components that supported access of the RedShift data warehouse as well as a range of other data sources.

“With our previous ETL products, we were unable to get sufficient support and ended up experiencing difficulties. With Talend we no longer have these concerns as support is always readily available.”

New customer insights and operational benefits With the new platform fully operational, Golf Digest Online is able to gather and process data such as retail transactions, golf course reservations, game scores and member activity.Once each day, data is transferred to the AWS data warehouse where business intelligence tools are used to perform sophisticated analysis. The Big data platform is used to generate insights that support the creation of personalised marketing materials which are regularly distributed to members.

The shift to AWS has provided Golf Digest Online with the ability to quickly scale its infrastructure as business demands increase. As a result, processing and analysis can be completed smoothly and well within required timelines.

“Before adopting Talend, we found it difficult to analyse our processing performance,” said Mr Shiga. “Now it is possible to monitor our operational status by viewing logs. This allows us to identify potential issues before they occur, further improving our overall performance.”

Shifting to a cloud platform has also reduced maintenance requirements. This has allowed more resources to be allocated to higher priority tasks such as improving and expanding the company’s digital marketing infrastructure.

“Talend is easy to understand in terms of graphical user interface relationships and the processing of data. As a result, we have been able to reduce the jobs from around 2,000 to just 500.”

Future plans Golf Digest Online continues to work closely with technology partner, Air Co., Ltd. and will seek further ways to improve data collection and analysis capabilities. The company is considering using machine learning techniques that will provide even richer insights into the activities of its customers in the future.

“Talend is a valuable source of support for our operations and I am confident it will continue to provide the capabilities we need to support our growing operations,” concluded Mr Shiga.

www.talend.com/contact | info@talend.com | partners@talend.com | sales@talend.com