Transcription
BigData and BigSoftware from BigR.io DeliverBig Growth for eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions
Table of ContentsIntroduction3The Situation4Objectives6BigR.io’s Roles and Responsibilities in the Project7The Results9Implications of Big Data on Future Applications11 Copyright 2015, BigR.io, LLC. All Rights Reserved2BigR.io, LLC Boston Harrisburg New York San Francisco
IntroductionIn 2014, eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions (EEMS) contracted with BigR.io to build fundamentalcomponents of a new Customer Engagement Engine (CEE) for their Commerce Marketing Platform.The CEE, a demand generation marketing solution, creates feedback loops that are extremely data-richand integrated with marketing analytics. eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions and its clients leveragethose analytics to improve the accuracy and preferences of customer profiles and maximize campaignresults.BigR.io’s expertise enabled the CEE to handle data from tens of millions of end-users every day with99.999% availability at peak traffic. The state-of-the-art system integrates the e-commerce operationsof eBay partners such as major retailers, Fortune 500 consumer brands, professional sports leagues,and major U.S. airlines.3
The SituationEBay Enterprise was formerly known as GSI Commerce, whicheBay acquired in 2011 and renamed as eBay Enterprise twoyears later. eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions, a divisionof eBay Enterprise, creates, develops, and operates onlineshopping sites for more than 1,000 brands and retailers.The company delivers consistent omnichannel experiences across all retail touch pointsto attract and engage new customers, convert browsers into loyal buyers, and deliverproducts with speed and quality. Among the services that eBay Enterprise MarketingSolutions provides are marketing, consumer engagement, customer care, paymentprocessing, fulfillment, fraud detection, and technology integration. The company hasoffices in North America, Europe, and Asia.4BigR.io, LLC Boston Harrisburg New York San Francisco
The CEE is the central component of the EEMSCommerce Marketing Platform (CMP), which eBayannounced in September 2014 and launching in 2015.The CMP contains nine components:To achieve its business goals – central to which were increasing the accuracy of customeranalytics to drive growth in customers, revenue, and profit margins – eBay Enterprise MarketingSolutions selected BigR.io as their key technology partner with world-class expertise in bigdata and proven success in large scale data architecture, software development, and the manydiverse technologies surrounding big data projects.Customer Engagement EngineDisplay EngineAffiliate EngineAttribution EngineMedia PlannerAudience Insights EngineSocial EngineOptimization EngineLoyalty Engine5
ObjectivesUsing eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions, the parent company wanted to reestablish its competitive advantage as the premier e-commerce vendorby re-architecting GSI’s legacy e-commerce platform from a hodgepodge of disparate technologies and frameworks into a single, powerful, andefficient platform.The new platform had to outperform its predecessor in terms of transactional data velocity, while reasserting their dominant position as one of themost reliable highest volume e-commerce vendors in the world.6BigR.io, LLC Boston Harrisburg New York San Francisco
The project business case for the CEE includedthe following requirements:BigR.io’s Roles and Responsibilities in the Project As the developer of CEE’s core module, the Data Ingest, BigR.io had the task of architectingA foundation characterized by a scalable,extendable, and maintainable architecture Increased marketing campaignmanagement control and functionality The capability to funnel and capture more,and more detailed, customer data thanwas possible at the project outset A richer marketing analytics feature setand building an edge server and data ingest component that had three primary functions:1. Transparently redirect customer browsers from a vanity URL embedded within their messagesto a final destination,2. Log customer metadata to a NoSQL store for marketing analysis, and3. Perform additional logging of open detect and click-to-sale conversion events.Because the Data Ingest Module is the most critical component in the CEE, it must operate athigher availability (99.999%), higher performance and with more robust security than the othercomponents. BigR.io’s responsibility included architecting and developing the datastore (CEE’ssystem of record for security metadata, encryption keys and critical marketing metadata), as well asthe load balancing and disaster recovery functionality .BigR.io had to build all this functionality to the following constraints: Capable of handling on the order of100 billion messages annually Distributed operation across multipledata centers and logical pods High-Availability: 99.999 percentuptime Multi-layered security measures tothwart phishing attacksIntegration with numerous othersystem components produced both inhouse and by third-party vendors7
To meet eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions’s objectives forthe CEE, BigR.io first determined appropriate technologies andframeworks for the engine. This was a significant challenge, asEEMS had been operating a mixed bag of legacy systems piecedtogether stemming from several corporate acquisitions.BigR.io architected, deployed, and managed the following:A Portfolio of Apache & Other Open Source ProjectsCloud ComputingContent Management SystemsModern DevOps (Continuous Integration)Marketing Analytics SystemsNoSQLCutting Edge Development Tools, Languages, & Databases8BigR.io, LLC Boston Harrisburg New York San Francisco
ketingMessagesLink onsMarketerDATA INGESTThe ResultsBigR.io’s Data Ingest module is the functionalcenter of the CEE. This ensures that incomingand archived data are available to CEE’spowerful analytics technologies - providing theBusinessIntelligenceEvent Datacommerce insights and demand generationnecessary to optimize the relevance and valueof each customer’s purchasing journey.Analytics &ReportingDataWarehouse9
With the CEE in place, eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions enabled its marketers to drive and optimize one-to-onecommerce at scale. Both EEMS and their clients now capture and utilize more customer data than ever before.As a result of BigR.io’s work on the CEE, EEMS expects to double performance across a number of metrics.Performance MetricsPost project capacity 2015120 BillionLegacy Metrics 201463BillionMessages / Year105 Million2.4MillionMessages / Minute@ Peak100 Thousand58ThousandAudience / Campaign5.5thousand5.5Thousand2.8ThousandCampaigns / DayBigR.io, LLC Boston Harrisburg New York San Francisco
Implications of Big Data on Future ApplicationsThe business case for the investment in the CEE was based upon theenormous, yet previously unrealized value in the data represented by theOur teams of data scientists and engineers will pave the way to efficientanalytics, new business insights, and better decision-making.customers of eBay and its downstream business partners. That data enablesthe targeting of marketing campaigns more precisely than ever before.With so much data available from customers, marketers can speak to themvirtually on a one-on-one basis.For every engagement, BigR.io brings depths of experience in all aspects ofdata management, from integration, access, and governance to security andcluster operations. Our infrastructure expertise provides best practices inApache Hadoop, Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) and NoSQL systems.BigR.io helps organizations exploit big data by specializing in thedevelopment and support of enterprise-level data projects. We can help yourcompany pool and normalize your data with our cutting-edge custom dataintegration, cleansing, and validation services. Thanks to the volumes ofOur structured and unstructured data strategies include integrationexpertise in pooling and partitioning integration, and quality expertise incleansing and validation. And our analytics capabilities ensure more usableand accurate data to drive better business insights.transactional and behavioral data that customers are sharing through theirmultichannel interactions, there are tremendous opportunities for digitalorganizations to identify new ways to drive internal efficiencies and optimizethe customer experience.11
About BigR.ioBigR.io is a technology consulting company that empowers data through 360 solutions to drivemarketing analytics, business insights, and revenue growth. Our unique agile customer engagement platform creates value through the synergies of the four divisions: BigData, BigSoftware,BigResourcing & BigVar. BigR.io is proud to service customers in the technology, e-commerce,retail, healthcare, government, biotech, higher education, and financial services industries.Learn more at www.bigr.io12BigR.io, LLC Boston Harrisburg New York San Francisco
This document is copyrighted material, Copyright 2015, BigR.io, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may bereproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic ormechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of noncommercial uses permitted bycopyright law. For permission requests, contact BigR.io by email at info@bigr.ioBigR.io, LLCOne Boston PlaceSuite #2600Boston, MA 02108The BigR.io logo is a trademark of BigR.io, LLC. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Using eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions, the parent company wanted to reestablish its competitive advantage as the premier e-commerce vendor by re-architecting GSI's legacy e-commerce platform from a hodgepodge of disparate technologies and frameworks into a single, powerful, and efficient platform.
