Wavenet Technology chose MySQL HeatWave as the most efficient and cost-effective way to boost their digital marketing and ecommerce application.
Introduction & Background
Digital marketing technology company Wavenet supports e-commerce platforms in the Asia-Pacific market to deliver tailored marketing to their target audiences. Founded in 2010, with offices in Taiwan, China, and Malaysia, Wavenet uses AI and big data analytics to provide advanced marketing services and functions. These include real-time budget allocation across different media as well as 24-hour real-time optimization and media tracking.
Wavenet works with vast quantities of data each day on consumer behaviors, preferences, and trends. The company identifies, analyzes, and applies this data in increasingly complex and sophisticated ways. This enables customers to design, deliver, and adapt their marketing and advertising in order to maximize performance and conversions.
Business Challenges & Goals
With business thriving, Wavenet reached a point where the amount of data exceeded the capacity of its existing systems. The company extracts and prepares batches of raw data from each customer to assess and test out what kind of algorithm to use in their marketing. As Wavenet's customer base grew, the extract-transform-load (ETL) process became increasingly time-consuming and laborious.
The sheer volume of data processing delayed key customer reports. Wavenet provides a dashboard to its VIP-level customers, so they can consult the latest figures on their marketing and advertising performance, as well as analyze their customer data. But with the dashboard processing more than a million queries at once, users had to wait several minutes to receive a response to their queries. This fell short of the level of customer service Wavenet wanted to provide.
The limitations of Wavenet's data processing setup were hampering its business development plans. The company wanted to expand into offering marketing automation services, a fast-growing and profitable market space. As consumer behavior becomes more fragmented and unpredictable, marketing automation becomes increasingly valuable. It reduces time and effort spent by marketing personnel, while optimizing marketing effectiveness for customers at all stages of the buying journey.
To develop and deliver more marketing automation services, Wavenet needed to be able to manage huge amounts of data in increasingly sophisticated ways, far beyond the capabilities of their existing system. The company needed to deploy a high-performance and secure yet affordable database that would provide the speed, power, and confidence to achieve its growth targets.
Business Results & Metrics
Wavenet chose MySQL HeatWave on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) as the fastest, most efficient, and cost-effective option to upgrade its data processing capabilities and sophistication. The company has reduced its total cost of ownership by at least 30% since moving from AWS Redshift to MySQL HeatWave. Wavenet now has the processing power and confidence to expand further into the profitable space of marketing automation.
"Since we started using MySQL HeatWave, we're saving a lot of time and labor on exploring data and algorithms. We are experiencing very fast response time when modeling on raw data using HeatWave. This helps us design the best algorithm or modeling around that data," says Hung Chih Chieh.
Wavenet's data management has gained significant speed and flexibility after deploying MySQL HeatWave. Now, Wavenet staff can work directly with the raw data stored in MySQL HeatWave, rather than having to extract and process data separately. By eliminating the ETL process, manual data manipulation and computing time are significantly reduced.
Wavenet is using Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) for data visualization and reporting, fully integrated with MySQL HeatWave. Using OAC, the company can easily and flexibly create and view reports on any data set within their database. "We can present data in a very dynamic way. And it's straightforward and convenient to use," says Hung Chih Chieh.
The usability of Wavenet's VIP customer dashboard has taken a quantum leap. Response times for customer queries have been slashed from several minutes to just a few seconds. MySQL HeatWave also enables more sophisticated data analysis. "Now our customer dashboard is more dynamic and flexible, so it's easier for VIP-level customers to submit specific queries and get insights into their data. This is a very good selling point for them," explains Hung Chih Chieh.
Wavenet is using MySQL Autopilot to automate functions run through HeatWave. "We rely on Autopilot to fine-tune performance for us. It helps us dynamically configure parameters and optimize data placement and queries," says Johnny Hong, Data Scientist, Wavenet Technology.
Since deploying MySQL HeatWave, Wavenet has increased its confidence to develop new, more challenging applications. Expanding its range of marketing automation services and functions will help increase the company's profitability.
Why MySQL HeatWave
Wavenet chose MySQL HeatWave as the most cost-effective big data solution that would support the company's market expansion plans. Wavenet was also impressed by the level of support provided by the MySQL development team. This gave them confidence that security risks were minimized and their investment well protected.
"We had five reasons for changing to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. First, OCI has a very simple architecture. Second, the cost is more reasonable compared to competitors, which is important as Wavenet has limited resources to manage the platform. Third, we wanted to use Oracle Analytics Cloud, which unlike competitors has a dashboard that's very easy to use and is integrated with MySQL HeatWave. Fourth, Oracle support is very good, we're very satisfied with it. And finally, we wanted HeatWave to accelerate our data processing, so it's not necessary to do ETL anymore," says Hung Chih Chieh.