Month: July 2016

Competition is stiff. With the onset of Internet protocol TV and “over the top” technology, satellite, telco and cable set-top box providers are scrambling to increase the stickiness of their subscription services. The best way to do this is to provide real-time context marketing for their set-top boxes in order to know the customer’s interests and intentions immediately, and tailor services and offers on-the-fly.

In order to make this happen, these companies need three things:

• They need to be able to ingest huge volumes of disparate data from a gazillion set-top boxes around the world.
• They need to be able to – in real time – enrich that data with customer information/behavior and historical trends to assess the customer’s interest in-the-moment.
• They need to be able to map that enriched data to a set of offers or services while the customer is still present and interested.

The Striim platform helps companies deliver real-time, context marketing applications that addresses all three phases of interaction and analysis. It collects your real-time set top box clickstream data and enriches it with a broad range of contextual data sources such as customer history and past behavior, geolocation, mobile device information, sensors, log files, social media and database transactions.

With Striim’s easy-to-use GUI and SQL-like language, users can rapidly create tailored enterprise-scale, context-driven marketing applications.

The aggregation of real-time and historical information via the set-top box makes it possible for providers to know who is watching right now, where they are, and what their purchasing patterns look like. With this context, providers can instantly deliver the most relevant and effective advertising or offer while the customer is still “present,” giving the provider the best change of motivating the customer to take immediate action.

With the Striim platform, users can deliver a streaming analytics application that constantly integrates real-time actions and location with historical data and trends. Once the customers intentions are identified, they can easily take action to either promote retention or incentivize additional purchases.

Detecting behavior that would be out-of-the-norm may signal a completely new set of advertising opportunities. For example, if a working Mom is at home watching the Disney Channel, it might indicate she is home with a sick child. With streaming analytics and context marketing, this scenario would be detected immediately, and could trigger a set of ads within the customer’s video stream that provide offers for children’s cold and flu medicine.

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At its most basic, the goal of log file monitoring is finding things which otherwise would have been missed, such as trends, anomalies, changes, risks, and opportunities. For some firms, log files exist to meet compliance requirements or because software already in use generates them automatically. But for others, analyzing log files – even in real time, as they are created – is incredibly valuable.

In many industries, the speed with which analysis is performed is immaterial. For a personnel-heavy division, for example, looking at employee logs weekly or monthly might provide enough information.

For others, though, the difference between detecting an upsell opportunity while a customer is still on their website, compared to 30 seconds later, could make a difference in what’s purchased. For a smaller subset of applications, real-time monitoring can make the difference between catastrophic failures which could cost millions, and routine maintenance solving the problem.

In general, fields where the mean time to recover from failure is high, and cost of downtime expensive, real-time log file monitoring can prevent costly mistakes and open up otherwise missed opportunities.

Let’s look at two fields that are rapidly adopting real-time analytics: manufacturing and financial services.

Banking & Financial Services

Real-time analysis of log files presents three major opportunities to financial services firms.

First, it allows them the opportunity to make trades faster. Real-time log file monitoring can find network issues and unwanted latency, ensuring that trades are committed when they’re ordered – not later, when the opportunity for arbitrage is entirely passed.

Second, real-time analysis of customer interactions (with ATMs, electronic banking, or even service representatives) provides the opportunity to increase customer satisfaction and even upsell opportunities by noticing trends in behavior as they happen.

Third, real-time analysis of log files is a tremendous boon to security. In a world reliant on technology to support delicate financial systems, real-time analysis may catch network intruders before they can commit crimes. Legacy analysis would find only traces and lost money.

Manufacturing

For manufacturers, especially heavily automated ones, uptime can be critical. Any time that a factory isn’t running because something has gone wrong, it could be losing money both for the company directly, and for any clients downstream who might rely on it to produce intermediate goods.

In these circumstances, real-time monitoring can alleviate risks. Analyzing logs daily, or even every half-hour, wouldn’t notice a machine malfunctioning until potentially too late. On the other hand, real-time analysis can detect failure before it spreads from one machine into the next part of an assembly line.

Real-time analysis can also provide opportunities for manufacturers to streamline operations. In cases where factory equipment is heavily specialized, for example, repair parts can take days or weeks to arrive, all of which is downtime.

Weekly log analysis likely wouldn’t detect parts beginning to wear down until it’s too late. Real-time analysis, on the other hand, allows factory operators to purchase replacement parts preemptively, thereby minimizing or eliminating downtime.

Additionally, real-time log file monitoring in the manufacturing sector can allow companies to keep smaller quantities of inventory or intermediate products on hand. This can help to lower costs and streamline operations.

Ultimately, not every company or business unit will gain tremendous value from real-time analysis. Most, however, will find far more value in under-utilized log files than they expect.

As costs come down and real-time analysis proliferates, it would be prudent for companies to make sure they’re ahead of the curve, or at least tracking it as it evolves.

The key factor that makes real-time visualization preferable to batch or event-driven visualization is the requirement for immediacy of decision making, which tends to be role-based. A C-suite officer, for example, is unlikely to look at one visual representation of any data and change the strategy their company is taking.

Conversely, real-time visualization can be tremendously helpful to individuals who must make tactical or operational decisions on the fly.

But before looking at specific uses for real-time data visualization, let’s consider what kinds of use cases most benefit from visualizingin real time. They can generally be broken down into two categories:

1. Those which allow individuals or firms to better deal with risk, both managing it and responding when something goes wrong
2. Those which allow them to exploit rapidly emerging opportunities before they disappear

These circumstances, where action must be taken quickly, are where real-time visualizations shine in providing additional context for decision makers.

Use Case 1: Crisis Management

Perhaps the greatest value of real-time visualization in handling risk comes from informing decision makers who need to respond to emergent events. If a storm is on track to destroy a data center, retail outlet, or any part of a firm’s infrastructure or supply chain, for example, real-time visualization can be tremendously helpful.

Descriptive analytics delivered periodically do little for a decision maker concerned with getting customer services up immediately – by the time any analysis is available, the situation is likely to have changed.

Conversely, real-time visualization of assets in a variety of geographic locations allows decision makers to allocate resources where they’re needed most, which can be the difference between keeping and losing customers in industries where uptime is critical.

Use Case 2: Security and Fraud Prevention

In addition to giving firms options for responding to risky situations, real-time visualizations provide tremendous opportunity for reducing risk in day-to-day operations. The ability to centralize and visualize the output from all the sensors a firm has (for example, security cameras, burglar alarms, RFID tags on valuable assets, etc.) allows a single person to monitor billions of dollars’ worth of globally distributed property from one place.

This also makes it easier to find individuals who are attempting to defraud or otherwise steal from a firm before they’ve gotten away with it, because real-time visualizations can alert managers and decision makers to suspicious behavior before fraud actually occurs.

Use Case 3: Resource Management

This use case sits between risk and opportunity, and represents a unique chance for firms to maximize the value they get from existing resources.

Real-time visualization can aide managers in discovering inefficiencies and correct them long before legacy analysis would have signaled an anomaly. If, for example, a service vehicle goes out of commission midday, real-time visualization allows regional managers to react more efficiently and make better decisions with all the available information in front of them.

Use Case 4: Sales

Real-time data visualization opens up great opportunities for firms attempting to make more sales, both in brick-and-mortar institutions and in ecommerce.

Real-time analytics give firms the option to provide customers with contextual suggestions – for example, a supermarket suggesting a recipe using mostly ingredients already in a customer’s cart.

Combine this with more efficient inventory management (restocking hot items more quickly when they sell out), and real-time visualization gives firms a tremendous amount of flexibility to get more products out to consumers.

Use Case 5: Purchasing Decisions

For firms heavily reliant on the purchasing of commodities for their operations, the ability to visualize market trends in real time provides a great deal of added value. It means utilities can buy oil at its cheapest point, and international firms can capitalize on changes in foreign exchange markets rapidly.

Batch or event-driven visualization could have firms buying hours after prices hit their low, whereas real-time processing will alert firms to cheap inputs, resulting in huge cost savings.

Ultimately, firms across a wide variety of markets would do well to consider real-time visualization technology. Perhaps it won’t change their strategic direction, but operational optimizations have the potential to save real money.