Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

With downloads in the millions globally, Jam City collects billions of rows of app download and usage data per day. The data science team of has stakeholders from all levels of the organization who depend on the timely insights derived from the analysis of this data to drive business decisions.

• User acquisition managers are always looking for new insights to drive growth with more data that went beyond what Tableau BI dashboards could provide. With the volume of data at hand, Tableau’s BI dashboards slow down and hinder the quick discovery process that leads to real insights.
• Product managers wanted real-time game analytics, to make timely optimizations. The existing streaming infrastructure provides the data in real-time, but the analytics and visualization stack was not able to keep up.
• Business questions that senior management would ask required views in Tableau which needed extensive data table manipulations due to the sheer number of rows. This required somewhat lengthy process resulting in longer response times, which may render questions irrelevant by the time answers were available.

The Solution

The Jam City data science team was looking for a solution as they started reaching the limits of the current stack:

• Tableau as the visualization tool were used with Postgres, Teradata was starting to slow down.
• Tedious data table manipulations that was needed to deal with the ever-growing data size were getting more complex.  More query optimizations were being undertaken to decrease data query times.
• In order to scale, additional CPU hardware was purchased to keep up with the ever-growing data size.

Always encouraged by open source companies and with MapD’s open source announcement, Jam City tried MapD Enterprise Edition on AWS Marketplace. MapD is a next-generation database and visualization platform that harnesses the parallel power of graphics processing units (GPUs) to enable exploration of multi-billion row datasets in milliseconds. With MapD, Jam City experienced speeds orders of magnitude faster than possible before.

The results

MapD provides the Jam City data science team and their stakeholders at all levels an immersive data exploration experience. MapD is able to deliver instantaneous analytics on data sets previously considered too large to explore interactively.

• User acquisition managers no longer need to wait for new Tableau views to be built or know what questions they need answers to before creating new views. MapD Immerse visualization client provides a self-discovery tool to explore relevant user acquisition data by slicing and dicing. This allows the user acquisition team to easily optimize channel expense and targeting to drive more growth by more fine-grained targeting.
• Product managers now experience near real-time data with MapD, which provides timely insights that translate offering players the best gaming experience. Easy data drill-down functionality also helps product managers come up with further ideas that can be tested, with the results available in MapD for immediate evaluation, thus minimizing the cycle from idea to implementation.
• Senior management questions are no longer delayed. They can be easily answered quickly and on the spot with MapD. By analyzing larger data sets and drilling down. The self-service nature of MapD Immerse and the ease with which it enables analysis of huge sets of data, entices users to keep querying the data for more insights, where otherwise they might have stopped once their original query was answered.

Metrics

• The fact that each business unit is now able to have easy exposure to data and analyses that cover other business areas together with their own, led to new businesses processes that eliminated traditional silos and encouraged cooperation among teams, where more of the ‘big picture’ is shared.
• True data democratization started taking shape and is encouraging ‘crowd-sourcing’ of insights generation.
• Insights gained by being able to examine complete sets of data with MapD led to the design of marketing tests that point to potential savings of up to 10%.

The Technology

MapD Enterprise Edition (MapD Core database and MapD Immerse visual client) on AWS Marketplace

Disruptive Factor

The implementation of MapD is changing the game for Jam City. It enables the business to derive insights from large amounts of data. The speed at which MapD’s GPU database queries billions of rows of data, paired with the killer app of their MapD Immerse front end, enabled Jam City to take journeys through data with quickness and ease that was not possible before.

The data science team is changing the way people work with data internally and gaining internal champions each day. Teams are used to long wait times to change a filter on a large Tableau “pivot” table and then completely giving up by not using Tableau dashboards at all. After seeing their data on MapD cross-filtered and visualized for easy understanding in seconds, their calling the solution “perfect.” MapD technology will pivot analysts and business users away from the Tableau mindset to seamless data discovery.

Shining Moment

Before using MapD, data analysis required a lengthy process that hindered analyst creativity. Going from long query times to the ability to query and visualize millions of rows in milliseconds led to a new kind of spontaneous insight generation and a true form of data democratization. It is akin to gaining an extra sense.