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Real time: The next frontier for analytics Received (in revised form): 23rd September, 2014 Andrew W. Pearson is the Managing Director of Qualex Asia Limited, a leading software big data, fast data, mobile and social media implementer for the gaming, finance, healthcare, energy, hospitality and retail industries. He has written books on casino marketing, predictive analytics and mobile and social media. A frequent speaker on such topics as big data, predictive analytics, customer relationship management (CRM) and social CRM, as well as mobile and social media, Mr Pearson is fascinated by the rapidly changing business world, especially in Asia. Qualex Asia, 1 Central Residences, Lot B, Zone B, Tower 7, 24A, NAPE, Macau Tel: +853 6265 5885; E-mail: [email protected] Abstract In 1999, ’The Cluetrain Manifesto’ warned that ‘markets are conversations’. Finally, some 15 years later, software, hardware, mobile and social media vendors have come together to provide tools that allow companies to join and manipulate the conversation. This paper provides a quick overview of the available hardware and software solutions; a discussion of the in-memory landscape, including the strengths and weaknesses of the competing products; and a summary of the latest developments in the social media monitoring space. Given the importance of personalisation and one-to-one advertising for increasing traffic, raising customer conversion rates and increasing average order value, these systems can either be a company’s best friend or its worst enemy. KEYWORDS: augmented reality, in-memory systems, personalisation, CRM, social CRM, real-time marketing, content marketing, social media monitoring, social media sentiment, social media context INTRODUCTION The Wall Street Journal’. Its prescient In 1999, Rick Levine, Christopher Lock, warning that ‘We are immune to Doc Searle and David Weinberger wrote advertising’ foresaw the impending social ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’,1 the first thesis media revolution that gave users a of which was: ‘markets are conversations’.2 platform on which to subvert and In the following 94 tenets, the writers circumvent normal advertising channels.2 stressed how the internet was As ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’ points revolutionising the way businesses should out, ‘Real-time marketing is the execution communicate with their customers and of a thoughtful and strategic plan that businesses that failed to adapt and specifically designed to engage customers treat their customers with respect, their on their terms via digital social customers would desert them. Its tone was technologies’.2 Wikipedia expands this at times irreverent — ‘Companies need to definition, defining real-time marketing as realise their markets are often laughing. At them’; and at other times deadly serious ‘marketing performed “on-the-fly” to — ‘We want you to take 50 million of us determine an appropriate or optimal as seriously as you take one reporter from approach to a particular customer at a ᭧ Henry Stewart Publications 2050-0076 (2014) Vol. 2, 3 000–000 Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing 1 The next frontier for analytics particular time and place. It is a form of the inclusion of new data), to actually market research inbound marketing that manipulating customer behaviour with seeks the most appropriate offer for a given target-specific promotional offers and customer sales opportunity, reversing the marketing campaigns. These are the traditional outbound marketing (or interruption marketing) which aims to channels where real-time marketing acquire appropriate customers for a given thrives, and this is where a company can “pre-defined” offer’.3 gain a powerful competitive advantage when using it. Real-time marketing is inexpensive For a real-time platform to work, data compared with the cost of traditional paid must be gathered from multiple and media. ‘Expensive research, focus groups, disparate sources, such as enterprise and awareness campaigns can be replaced resource planning (ERP), customer with online surveys, blog comments, and relationship management (CRM), and tweets by anyone or any business’.2 social CRM platforms, geofencing6 Successful mobile advertising requires applications (like Jiepang and Foursquare), three things: reach, purity and analytics. over-the-top services (like WhatsApp and Reach can be fostered by accessing WeChat), mobile apps, augmented reality accounts through multiple platforms like apps, and other mobile and social media blogs, geofencing applications, over-the-top systems. The data must be collected and (OTT)4 services, mobile apps, QR codes, then seamlessly integrated into a data push and pull services, RSS feeds, search, warehouse that can cleanse and prepare the social media sites and video-casting, among data for consumption.5 As the authors state: others. Purity refers to the message and its cleanliness: if the data are unstructured and ‘The analytical system must have the untrustworthy, they are basically useless. capability to digest all the user data, Data governance is paramount for summarise it, and update the master user real-time advertising to work properly. The profile. This functionality is essential to third ingredient, analytics, ‘involves provide the rich user segmentation that is at the heart of recommendations, campaign matching users’ interests — implicit and and offer management, and advertisements. explicit, context, preferences, network and The segmentation engine can cluster users handset conditions — to ads and into affinities and different groups based on 5 promotions in real time’. An explicit geographic, demographic or interest would be an easily quantifiable socio-economic, psychographic, and one, ie one that could be manually added behavioral characteristics’.5 to a database, while an implicit one might be a user’s behaviour patterns, ie something This translates to a lot of data and indirectly expressed. businesses today are faced with the issue of Successful marketing is about reaching a how to deal with such massive volumes, consumer with an interesting offer when which, in some cases, come from hundreds he or she is primed to accept it. Knowing of different sources, including point-of-sale what might interest a consumer is half the (POS) counters, other customer battle to making the sale and this is where transactions systems, CRM and social customer analytics comes in. Customer CRM databases as well as a multitude of analytics has evolved from simply social and mobile platforms. Some reporting customer behaviour to companies will feel overwhelmed by such segmenting customers based on their volumes of data, while others will see one profitability, to predicting that profitability, of the greatest business opportunities of to improving those predictions (because of the 21st century. Most major software 2 Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing Vol. 2, 3 000–000 ᭧ Henry Stewart Publications 2050-0076 (2014) Pearson vendors are clambering for market share, and filtering one’s data, creating calculated but they have to walk a fine line as their fields, defining key performance indicators clients might be faced with complex and creating user-defined hierarchies, but legacy systems that might be integrated ‘this client-side approach can create with software from other competitors. Any disconnected islands of analysis with changes to these systems could be very disparate data models and versions of costly. In-memory computing — the information from user to user’.7 This storage of information in a server’s main negates a lot of the reason why one would random access memory (RAM) rather want to install an in-memory system, than in complicated and comparatively namely, to structure data within the entire slow relational databases — has been all organisation so everyone can be drawing the rage over the past few years and off the same data warehouse, data marts vendors like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and analytics foundations. and Teradata are all fighting for superiority. Oracle’s answer for in-memory analytical performance, Exalytics, faces similar limitations.7 This caching appliance HARDWARE: IN-MEMORY overlaps with its Exadata machine, creating In-memory solutions that utilise a system’s more copies of data, and it also requires a RAM to quickly detect and exploit TimesTen or Essbase in-memory database patterns in massive data warehouses almost licence. In addition, the Oracle Database on the fly have been around for decades. 12c In-Memory Option will not be IBM’s solidDB and Oracle’s TimesTen date released before the first quarter of 2015 at back to 1992 and 1996, respectively, but the earliest. these systems were developed as niche SAP advertises that its Hana platform products and are not useful for today’s can run an entire company, ‘including mass ERP markets.7 Current in-memory both its mission-critical transactional heavyweights include IBM, Teradata and applications (like ERP and CRM), and its SAP. Microsoft and Oracle will be analytic needs (things heretofore handled introducing their in-memory solutions in by the separate database management mid-2014, with In-Memory OLTP systems (DBMSes) underpinning data (formerly Hekaton) launching alongside warehouses and data marts)’.7 IBM’s BLU Microsoft SQL Server 2014. Acceleration for DB2 ‘combines both As reported in Information Week, IBM’s columnar compression8 and in-memory BLU Acceleration is specifically developed processing to accelerate analytics’.7 for analytics: Teradata’s Intelligent Memory ‘automatically moves

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