Gaining New Insights
from Data Lakes
Real-life success stories from big data pioneers.
Building Scalable Data Lakes
A data lake is the foundation of any big data and analytics solution, combining all sources of data in a single location from which various data-management, discovery, and analytics actions can take place.
Having this foundation as the basis of your platform can dramatically increase your ability to gain new insights from data, and unlock new opportunities for your organization.
Read the case studies in this section to see how Oracle has helped organizations like yours:
Consolidate data into a single pool to simplify analysis
Gain new insights into operational performance and customer behavior
Define, monitor, and drive business improvements using advanced analytics
mStart
Telefónica
Wiggle
mStart Improves Customer Experiences
While Cutting Transportation Costs
Founded in 2010, mStart is a Croatian provider of business and technological IT solutions oriented towards development, implementation, integration, and IT support for the agriculture, industrial, and retail sectors.
The company is part of the Agrokor food production and distribution group, and has a strong focus on reducing energy usage, water consumption, and carbon dioxide emissions.
The companies mStart serves handle more than one million retail transactions every day. That volume of transactions generates a lot of data, which mStart was eager to put to use.
Challenges
Quite simply, mStart needed to find a new way of extracting powerful insight from its data.
The company wanted to use customer data to improve customer experiences and service delivery; use transport data to reduce costs and optimize supply-chain operations; and use internal data to improve the efficiency of its own processes.
Solutions
By deploying the Oracle Big Data Appliance, mStart increased business agility and gained real-time insight into the activities of more than 2,000 stores serving 1.2 million customers daily in five countries. Those stores can now intelligently make same-day amendments to prices and promotions to boost revenue and optimize inventory management.
For mStart itself, the solution has helped reduce transportation costs, enhance supply-chain processes, and reduce waste and carbon dioxide emissions.
Telefónica Gets a Handle on Its Terabytes of Data
Telefónica is a major entertainment, broadband, and telecommunications provider with operations in Europe, Asia, and North, Central, and South America. It is one of the largest telephone operators and mobile network providers in the world, with more than 320 million customers.
Telefónica Spain has more than three million convergent fixed and mobile customers, more than 17 million mobile customers, and approximately 40 percent market share in mobile telephony, television, and internet. New technologies that enable the company to analyze audience preferences and then act on that intelligence have been key to a radical revamp of the company’s marketing activities and resulting customer—satisfaction ratings.
Challenges
Knowing that customer loyalty would increase customer spending, Telefónica needed to gain this insight to more accurately and effectively market to its customers
Solutions
Telefónica used Oracle Exadata and Oracle Big Data Appliance as the basis for a new architecture designed to handle all its data. The company can now make split-second recommendations to television viewers and can create audience segments for new campaigns in real time. Already, the company’s television recommendation engine has improved customer satisfaction and loyalty, and driven business growth—while increasing TV content consumption by 2.8 times.
But that’s not the only improvement Telefónica Spain has seen from its big data solution. It used to take 20 days to define a target audience for a CRM campaign; now, the company can market to a specific audience in real time. It also used to take 48 hours to follow up from sales campaigns; now, representatives follow up leads as they come in.
Wiggle Unifies Its Data to
Deliver Greater Customer Value
Founded in 1999 and based in Portsmouth, England, Wiggle is a provider of athletic equipment and apparel for triathletes. In 2016, a merger with Chain Reaction Cycles saw the two largest companies in the UK online cycle retail market unite under the banner Wiggle-CRC Group.
Challenges
Wiggle.co.uk was an idea born in a Portsmouth cycle shop during the late 1990’s, and it has grown rapidly in the following years. Since its merger in 2016, Wiggle-CRC Group now generates an annual revenue of around £400 million.
Originally, the company had a traditional on-premises data warehouse architecture in place to help it gain value from its data and make the best business decisions. But, as it continued to grow, Wiggle needed to manage and serve different types of data to its different business functions—and at a much faster rate.
Wiggle knew the best way to do this was by building a centralized data lake that combined its various data sources, and made accessing the right information easier for everyone.
Solutions
Wiggle implemented Oracle Big Data Cloud to help unite data, drive growth, add value, and improve performance across the organization. Oracle Big Data Cloud now gathers information from Wiggle’s various data sources—whether that’s onpremises, in the cloud, managed by third parties, or part of its SaaS applications—and enables the retailer to serve the right data, to the right people, at exactly the right time.
By moving this data to a centralized resource, not only is it now easier to manage, but the costs of administrating these various data sources are dramatically reduced.
What’s more, the insight offered by the analytics tools is helping Wiggle to provide greater personalization to its customers, and deliver the experiences that add true value to their activities.