Overview

pTrue Digital is a multinational technology company headquartered in Bangkok, Thailand. It was created with an aim to become the ultimate digital transformation enabler for everyone in Southeast Asia. The company has built competences in cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain, cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), and robotics. It has built a unique ecosystem of digital platforms and solutions and offers a portfolio of digital services, aimed respectively at consumer, merchant, and enterprise markets. Key businesses include Digital Media, O2O and Privilege, Data Analytics, IoT and Digital Solutions, as well as True Digital Academy. The company has a regional footprint with current operations in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines./p

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

pTrue Digital has built a strong analytic product business delivering insights to retailers, banks, and restaurants. Their B2B customers use these products to determine where to locate new outlets, which marketing campaign to launch, and predict where they may need to open/close an ATM or store. The unique datasets available to the telco include location and demographic data, which when analyzed in aggregate, provides value marketing and business operations insights to their customers. All of these products are based on batch-processed, historical data. True Digital never saw the need for real-time data, until COVID-19 struck. The Thai government and public health officials noticed that the lockdowns were driving workers out of large cities and into the villages, which would potentially further spread the virus. They wanted to understand these population movements so that they could take preventative, proactive measures. While access to historical data was interesting, it would not help to prevent the spread of the virus.  They enlisted True Digital’s help and, suddenly, this telecom needed to build an analytic solution using real-time data to help flatten the COVID-19 curve in Thailand./p

The Solution

pTrue Digital had built many analytic applications supporting their product line using technologies such as Hadoop map-reduce and Google BigQuery. Those had been adequate for the batch processing needs of big data analytics use cases, however, they knew from experience that the low-latency responsiveness the users needed for the interactive geospatial dashboard envisioned could not be delivered by those technologies. A developer in the group had previously had success with MemSQL for an application requiring high-speed ingestion with real-time analytics and and high concurrency and suggested they start there. Within two weeks, True Digital delivered their first, live operational version of TracePulse providing interactive anonymous drill down on real-time mass population movements./p

The results

pThis project changed the way that True Digital looked at data. They now see the business opportunities to introduce new real-time data products to the market. One of those areas is in transportation and contextual, location-based offers./p

Metrics

pTrue leveraged location pings ingested at 500,000 events per second from over 30 million anonymized cellphones to provide sub-second query response times for interactive drilldown for hundreds of concurrent users./p

The Technology

pMemSQL is a distributed, highly-scalable relational SQL database that is cloud-native and runs anywhere. MemSQL handles both OLTP and OLAP workloads in a single system, which fits with the direction of new applications to combine transactional and analytical requirements. MemSQL can ingest millions of events per second with ACID transactions while simultaneously analyzing billions of rows of data with standard SQL. MemSQL has native support for JSON, Full-text search, and geospatial types./p

Disruptive Factor

pSince TracePulse relies on anonymous cell phone location pings, no smartphones are required and there’s no app for subscribers to install. So, adoption did not present a challenge. However, the information security restrictions in place in the telco network made using Kafka difficult. The solution was to have MemSQL ingest data in parallel from Parquet files stored in Google Cloud Storage (GCS)./p

Shining Moment

pWe’re most proud of the close cooperation and trust between MemSQL and True Digital in working quickly to create something totally new and innovative in support of the bigger mission to save lives./p