A global provider of communication and network infrastructure services, the organization helps its clients to communicate more efficiently, and to collaborate and connect with their audiences through a diverse portfolio of solutions. These include unified communications services, safety services, interactive services such as automated notifications, telecom services and specialty agent services.
Challenge
The client was in the process of setting up a big data lake as their standard data warehouse repository.
“We were looking for experienced Hadoop engineers and admins to help us set up the new environment, while retiring Splunk and sunsetting other legacy applications,” said Priya S. of the client organization. The company targeted savings of $3 million by installing Cloudera Distribution of Hadoop and decommissioning various expensive big data warehouse technologies.
Concentrix Catalyst’s Data & Analytics team took over the Hadoop platform support and performance management. Catalyst big data experts installed the new technology and configured it in compliance with the client standards. Since the internal team of engineers had a limited understanding of Hadoop technology, we were able to bring them up to speed on the platform in a short period of time.
“My team of engineers were still learning but at the same time I had several projects that I had to get done with a sharp deadline,” said Priya. “I reached out to Catalyst for help.”
As part of our strategic partnership, Catalyst provided several hands-on workshops and demos to educate the client’s team of engineers and business analysts on the new tools and technology.
Solution
The client found Catalyst via the recommendation of Cloudera. “The Catalyst team was the most helpful with its proof of concept (PoC) and technology discussions,” said Priya. “They provided support and consulting even before our official partnership started.”
For each PoC, Catalyst provided to the customer more than one option and a clear recommendation based on their budget, timeline and available technology.
“My team supports different business units, so we had various data pipelines to be stood up,” said Priya. “We used Catalyst’s knowledge and expertise to build the data pipelines and also for sunsetting traditional relational data houses and moving all that content into Hadoop. They managed to set up an operations team to monitor and follow-up for failing pipelines and propose modifications. Their team was of enormous help when migrating content from several BI tools to Tableau.”
Catalyst established a use-case-driven roadmap for BI that reflected the client’s business needs and priorities. Our big data experts focused on the top three use cases and managed to deliver PoC ahead of deadline.
Interactive services hold more than 13% share of business for the client. We focused on this business unit and completed a PoC to analyze IVR (Interactive Voice Response) data on the Cloudera Hadoop platform. Our scope of work included:
- Architecting and deploying multiple clusters to build an integrated data repository that accommodates larger strategic use cases across the client organization.
- Operational management and maintenance of multiple clusters including administration, monitoring and DevOps.
The pilot was completed within six weeks using Cloudera Hadoop CDH 5. Raw IVR logs were ingested into HDFS partitioned by day and analyzed using Impala with Tableau for visualization.
Outcomes
“Our team of big data experts was able to implement a big data lake within the client’s aggressive timeline, and now we have become a strategic partner for them,” says Mani Raman at Catalyst. “Our solutions provided operational and analytic insights to the client and our commitment won the multi-year managed services contract with our client.”
A successful Hadoop data lake implementation requires a robust architecture and discipline around data governance policies. Catalyst executed the project impeccably, thus saving the client corporation nearly $3 million.
