Getting to Know You: How Lippo Group Leverages a GPU Database to Understand Their Customers and Make Better Business Decisions

Lippo Group is a prominent conglomerate with significant investments in digital technologies, education, financial services, healthcare, hospitality, media, IT, telecommunications, real estate, entertainment and retail. Lippo Group has a large global footprint around the world, with properties and services not only in Indonesia, but also in Singapore, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Myanmar, and Malaysia.

Lippo Group in Indonesia connects and serves over 120 million consumers, aggressively investing in big data and analytics technology through OVO.  OVO is Lippo Group Digital’s concierge platform, integrating mobile payment, loyalty points, and exclusive priority deals.

So, how does one of Asia’s largest conglomerates develop 360 degree views of their customers from multiple industry data sources and interact with these customers in a personalized way, while also opening up new revenue streams from data monetization? The answer lies in a combination of Kinetica’s centralized digital analytics platform and OVO “Smart Digital Channel” which will help marketers reach out to their audiences and better understand the customer journey.

Challenge: Create a Next-Gen Centralized Analytics Platform

The Lippo Group business ecosystem is vast, with data coming in from multiple lines of business across several industries. The goal was to consolidate fragmented customer data generated by transactional systems from various subsidiaries into a centralized analytics platform. Once consolidated, the data can then be analyzed to generate a 360-degree view of the customer profile and journey.

Solution: Deep and Fast Analytics Powered by Kinetica and NVIDIA

Lippo Group turned to Kinetica and NVIDIA to spur innovation in their big data and analytics strategy. The first project was to a derive insights on customers’ digital lifestyles, preference and spending behavior and deliver it in the form of API. Kinetica’s distributed, in-memory database combines customer profile, buying behavior, sentiment and shopping trends based on a variety of cross-industry data sources with millisecond latency–powering analytics at the speed of thought.

The new platform is now playing a key role in their multiple industry big data initiative. They are able to develop a full 360-degree profile of each customer, using multiple dimensions of customer attributes to describe their behavior, such as cross channel behavior, CRM/demographic/behavioral/geographic data, brand sentiment, social media behavior, and purchasing behavior via e-commerce, e-wallets, and loyalty programs. Lippo Group can now correlate all customer information and transactions to understand their profile and preferences in order to interact with them in a personalized way. They can also associate household members’ activities and preferences as consolidated profiles to deliver family-based personalized offers and improve their service experiences.

By having these types of 360 degree profiles, Lippo Group can improve overall customer experience, conversion rates, campaign take-up rates, inventory/product life cycle management, and future purchasing predictions.

The Technology Behind the Curtain

The underlying technology consists of a Hadoop big data cluster and an analytics layer on Kinetica. In the images below, you can see the evolution in the technology stack that took place to bring Lippo Group’s analytics to the next generation:

BEFORE:

Lippo Group’s legacy analytic consisted of Impala, Hive, and HBase

AFTER:

Lippo Group’s next-gen analytic API cluster  with Kinetica and the ability to augment with Machine Learning, powered by NVIDIA GPUs

Lippo can leverage any existing digital channel within the organization to deliver personalized messages/offers to their customers and embed machine learning for product recommendations. The same API can be reused multiple times across channels.

OVO will be able to correlate customer, transaction and location information, and geospatial analytics will deliver actionable insights for Lippo business units to  better understand business performance and help them outperform competitors. The big data API and AI platform enables all OVO touchpoint channels to introduce new and personalized experiences to customers in real time.

Results

Lippo Group’s mantra of “deep and fast analytics” is opening up new opportunities for improved customer engagement within the organization’s business ecosystem, as well as opening up new revenue streams from data monetization through their interactive digital channel. By having a big data API and AI platform in place, every company within the Lippo Group ecosystem will be able to access the Analytical and Campaign API Marketplace to perform queries through an analytic API that involves huge volumes and rich data sets in sub-second latency.

With the support from Kinetica and NVIDIA, Lippo Group Digital is the first enterprise to integrate an AI, in-memory, GPU database in Indonesia. By harnessing technology and using it with intensity, precision and speed, Lippo Group is now able to understand consumers better, meet their needs and expectations, and make informed operational and product decisions.

Learn more about this project from the Lippo Group presentation at Strata: