Greentube: personalizing the customer experience with real-time behavioral analytics
Key Highlights
Category
Entertainment
Location
Headquarters: Vienna, Austria
Solution highlights
- Modern Data Platform: Cloudera Enterprise with SDX
- Cloud Platform: Microsoft Azure
- Workloads: Operational Analytics, Data Science, Data Engineering,
- Key Components: Apache Kafka, Apache Kudu, Apache Sentry, Apache Spark, Cloudera Manager
Applications supported
- Real-time recommendation engine
- Personalization
- Fraud Detection
Data sources
- Real time events from Greentube game servers, core casino backend services, and core casino database systems
- Reference data from company’s enterprise data warehouse
Impact
- 2 percent revenue increase from game recommendations in one cohort
- 3 percent growth in subscription upgrades with targeted offers, resulting in incremental revenue gain of over €1 million
- Uncovered new fraud pattern that revealed large bot network
- 20 percent reduction in operational load by identifying and closing fraudulent accounts
- Reduced time to start large experiments within hours instead of days
Big data scale
- 1 TB of data processed daily
Greentube gains real-time insights into player behavior to grow its business using Cloudera on Microsoft Azure.
Greentube Internet Entertainment Solutions is a leading provider of online and mobile games, with its largest online casino serving more than a million active players each month. Part of the NOVOMATIC Group, a €2.3 billion producer of gaming equipment, Greentube also offers land-based casinos a digital gaming platform that they can rebrand to stay connected with their players.
Challenge
“Online casinos typically run the same types of games, such as roulette,” said Stefan Heil, Head of Greentube’s powerful online casino platform, Novo Remote Gaming System (NRGS). “So, we have to differentiate ourselves through new content, personalized experiences and offers.”
As the NRGS team met with business leaders on how they could enrich the gamer’s experience, it became apparent that they needed a modern data platform.
“Our biggest challenge wasn’t just breaking down data silos,” said Stefan Heil. “We needed to enable real-time analytics and machine learning. Our SQL Server data warehouses and their cubes could not serve our ever-growing analytics demand, especially from our Marketing and Customer Support teams.”
Solution
Greentube is transforming the gamer experience using Cloudera on Microsoft Azure. This architecture brings together and analyzes user behavior in real time to enable more targeted campaigns, recommendations, and personalized gaming experiences.
Cash gambling platforms, like Greentube’s, are a prime target for cybercriminals. As a result, Greentube also uses this same platform to uncover behavioral patterns and anomalies that may signal fraud.
“We spent six months evaluating our options, analyzing vendor offerings, and speaking with industry peers and other firms, ” said Stefan Heil. “They all recommended Cloudera. Additionally, Cloudera is unique in that it offers all the pieces to accelerate real-time analysis and data science, including enterprise-grade security, and the services to help us succeed on our transformation journey.”
Implementation
Greentube internally launched its modern platform with a series of workshops to show its business users what they could achieve with the platform. “Cloudera Professional Services workshops helped us identify opportunities to become more data driven and shape a journey that made sense for our business,” said Stefan Heil. “The process has brought different departments closer together and ideas emerged everywhere.”
Greentube took a hybrid approach in deploying the platform, conducting data science exploration in the cloud and then moving operational analytics on premise once the use case is ready for production.
“We can scale up and down to start large experiments within hours instead of days,” said Stefan Heil. “We can also collaborate more effectively with different teams and let them experiment to see how different algorithms perform.”
Added Andreas Nemeth, one of the team’s data scientists, “Using Cloudera’s unique and enterprise-proven technology stack, our capabilities for advanced analytics and data science have grown tremendously. Notably, technologies such as Apache Impala and Apache Kudu, which were originally developed by Cloudera, represent a real game-changer for our business and even the entire industry.”
Results
“With Cloudera, we can help our business teams gain real-time insights into player behavior for real-time decision making,” said Stefan Heil. “These insights are driving business growth.”
Previously, Greentube faced numerous constraints created by data silos and the absence of real-time analytic capabilities. Now, with the Cloudera platform, the company’s Marketing and Fraud teams are capturing insight that they couldn’t before. Already, three analytic projects have demonstrated valuable results:
The ability to predict and provide game recommendations based on each player’s behavior drove a two percent revenue lift in one cohort, a significant increase in this highly competitive industry.
Targeted in-game offers, such as special bonus campaigns, to a test group increased the number of players upgrading their subscription by three percent, resulting in an incremental revenue gain of over €1 million.
New insight into fraud patterns revealed a large bot network playing on one of its casino platforms in demo mode. When the fraud team closed the fraudulent accounts, as well as the loophole that enabled the bot network to operate, they saw a 20 percent reduction in load on the company’s platform. This immediately reduced operational costs and improved marketing KPIs.
“We’re competing in a new world and Cloudera is opening new possibilities,” said Stefan Heil.