BACKGROUND: PlayPhone is a leading global media company that provides entertainment content including ringtones, mobile games, wallpaper, videos and more to mobile consumers in more than 20 countries.
PLATFORMS: Currently we are running on a white label machine running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 with DAS array from Infortrend.
PROBLEM SOLVED: PlayPhone EMEA wanted to gain a better understanding of its customers and the effectiveness of its marketing campaigns to remain competitive by making well-informed business-critical decisions. Running reports for an overview of its business performance against the operational database took a long time because of the large volumes of data being queried. Running reports against the transactional database also ran the risk of slowing down the performance of the transactional database and possibly frustrating customers. To address these issues, PlayPhone EMEA implemented a Sybase IQ-powered business intelligence system.
PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: PlayPhone uses Sybase IQ to analyze data and rapidly gain increased insight and a better understanding of their customers and of the effectiveness of PlayPhone’s marketing campaigns. With a reduction in report generation times from hours to minutes, PlayPhone can now target customers more effectively and plan, execute, monitor and fine-tune marketing campaigns to achieve the best return on its marketing spend, all while ensuring fast performance of its critical transactional processing system.
STRENGTHS: Sybase IQ has all of the advanced analytic capabilities needed to enable more empirical decision-making based on access to large volumes of current transactional and historical data. Sybase IQ provides PlayPhone with the ability to query this data and receive results within seconds or minutes versus hours or days at a low cost, enabling us to target customers more effectively and customize marketing campaigns to maximize the impact of those campaigns.
WEAKNESSES: The main issue is getting experienced specialist technical staff to enhance and augment the database. While queries and general access to the data is straightforward and efficient, maintaining and improving the system well takes an experienced and talented team.
SELECTION CRITERIA: Our criteria for an analytics server included ease of support and low support overhead (to allow staff to focus on the data, not the server), high performance, data security, the ability to run on Red Hat Linux, the ability to run on small specification machines, efficient storage and proven reliability. After seeing an impressive demo of Sybase IQ at a show, we knew Sybase IQ would meet those requirements and be able to deliver dramatically faster results at a low cost.
DELIVERABLES: Sybase IQ produces standard reports involving large joins of large volumes of data that previously took up to an hour to run in less than a minute, providing us with answers needed to make better predictions and decisions. Marketers can now plan, execute and fine-tune marketing campaigns to produce the best return on marketing spend without impacting operational performance on transaction systems.
VENDOR SUPPORT: Sybase IQ has enabled us to gain a single view of our data for reporting and data mining purposes. It’s been extremely stable and reliable. I don’t think we’ve ever had to call customer service, which speaks volumes about its quality and reliability. It’s been faultless during our implementation. Also, having the ability to use the developer edition of Sybase IQ has allowed us to try different things before actually implementing them.
DOCUMENTATION: The documentation is adequate and fit for purpose. When we have needed to make unusual or infrequent changes, the documentation has been of sufficient quality to perform the tasks without resorting to technical support.
Sybase IQ
Sybase, Inc.
1 Sybase Drive
Dublin, CA 94568
(925) 236-5000
Product reviews are customer testimonials. We thank the author of this review for taking the time to share his or her expertise.
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