A Short,

No-Nonsense
Guide to the
Real Benefit
of Big Data
With Use Cases, Real-Life Examples
and Reference Architectures
 Sami Raines
Data Practice Lead (APAC)
“Big data is the ‘New Oil’: and Data Engineer

the black gold of the 21st century”
Sami is a developer, data engineer, and all
round tech enthusiast. Now a Master in Computer
Science, she is recognised for her broad knowledge
in data science & data analysis, data integration,
processing and machine learning techniques.

Contents
Big Data: Enabling the Impossible 02
What Is Big Data? 03
Why Big Data? 04
How to Use Big Data: 14 Use Cases and Real-World 05
Examples
3 Example Reference Architectures 14
How to Get Started with Big Data 20
On The Importance of Being Cloud-Native 21
Case Study: Jetstar 22
Conclusion: Daunting Data 23

01
Big Data: Enabling the What Is Big Data?
Impossible
“Big data is not about the data. It is about the analytics.”
Gary King, Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor, Harvard University
What is the point of big data? Simple:

Big data helps you to understand the world in ways that were The term ‘big data’ refers to megalithic piles of information that are
IMPOSSIBLE before. meaningless unless you have the power to analyse them.
Data itself is commodity. Everyone’s got loads of it. The value is in the clever analytics.
Then with this otherwise-impossible understanding you can make brilliant business decisions that...
Everyone already had vertical views of data within their own silo. Big data lets you bust out of those
otherwise would have been impossible!
blinkered views and get a horizontal and vertical and every-which-way view of data across your
organisation.

Understand your business. One of our clients joined two

What works. What doesn’t.
Understand your customers.
What makes them tick? And when? And where?
Understand the past and the future.
Analyse what happened in the past and use it to
grasp the future.
(previously siloed) data sets
together and derived one insight Big Data Novel Analytics Across Siloes Novel Insights ROI
that led to USD$3.5m of
additional annual revenue.
The insights that you can mine with good analysis
are so valuable that they’re calling big data the
Not bad.
‘New Oil’: the black gold of the 21st century.
In this white paper we will quickly introduce
The similarities are striking: wars are already being
what big data is and why you need it before
fought over data. Elections won and lost. The fates
giving you a big list of use cases, real-life
of countries decided. Friendship networks changed
examples and reference architectures.
forever. Policing transformed. Pugs made world-
famous.

The big data stakes are just as high for

businesses.

02 03
Why Big Data? How to Use Big Data:
You know those questions you are asking yourself about your business
14 Use Cases and
and your customers? Like how you can improve the former and get more
of the latter? Real-World Examples
The answers are in your data.
Let’s get straight into some
concrete use cases that
Business
You just can’t see the wood for the trees!
we have researched from
around the world to prove Digital Transformation
This is because big data is of such enormous volume, arriving
arriving at
at such
such velocity
velocity and
and characterised
characterised by
by
such variety that at first glance you can’t see what it could
could bring
bring you.
you. what your data can bring to Efficiency and Maturity
the table. Modelling
You don’t know what you don’t know.

But the reality is that you would fall off your chair ifif you
you knew
knew all
all the
the insights
insights you
you could
could get
get out
out of
of This list is the tip of the data-berg so
your data! far as use cases is concerned. But it should
give you a flavour of what’s hot in big data.
“Like what, then?” I hear you cry.

Let’s take a look at some use cases over the next few pages,
pages, alongside
alongside some
some real-world
real-world examples.
examples.
Huge amounts of data are a natural by-
product of modern IT. Proper analysis
can reveal whether you’re maturing as
an organisation, as well as the complex
relationships between cost, quality,
speed and security.

Example:

At Contino, we use dashboards to track

DevOps transformations and see how
you are reducing effort and costs while
improving velocity, quality and security.
We track release frequency, wait times,
costs, man days by SDLC phase, and
the value added by freeing up resources.
Security, mean-time-to-recovery, and
incident reduction can also
be tracked.

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Predictive and Real-Time
Decision Making
How will the weather, elections, public
holidays and so on affect how people use
your product or service? Big data can be
used to predict peaks and troughs, as
well as respond to them in real-time.
Example:
Transport for New South Wales gathers
real-time transport usage data from
across their network as well as data from
weather apps and historical passenger
data to drive real-time predictions.
They can predict in real-time how the
weather or popular events (concerts
etc.) will impact transport usage, how
many replacement buses will be needed
if a service is cancelled or to pin-point
stations where unforeseeable events
are causing delays. All while keeping
executives happy with a near-real-time
dashboard of network activity!
Price Optimisation
Use data from past events and customer
behaviour to create predictive dynamic
pricing that changes based on context.
Build models for what different
customers are likely to be willing to pay
and see where profits may be leaking.
Example: leading Spanish retailer
A leading Spanish retailer used
continuous and seamless pricing of items
based on real-time value, markdown
optimization and real-time electronic
shelf labels alongside continuous
inventory management.
The company has decreased food waste
by 33% and increased revenues by 6.3%.
06
Operational Efficiency
Identify opportunities to do things better
and faster in real time! Manage your
inventory in real time. Figure out where
there are bottlenecks in the customer
journey or manufacturing line. Predict
outages based on connected device data.
Example:
PepsiCo retains huge volumes of data for
supply chain management. This way, the
company ensures retailers have the right
products, in the right volumes and at the
right time.
By adopting Hortonworks, Trifacta,
and Tableau, PepsiCo has been able to
automate the bulk of their regular data
preparation processes and improve the
speed and accuracy of their reporting.
Predictive Maintenance
Fix things (your factory equipment, your
IT infrastructure - whatever!) before they
break!
Example:
Lockheed Martin uses big data to
visualise damages on its F-35 fighter
jets to within 1/10th of an inch via a
complex 3D virtual model. Previously
time-consuming hand-drawings and
spreadsheets were in use.
With the new system, airforce
technicians can instantly determine
whether a plane is flight-worthy,
document and repair damage more
quickly and reduce mistakes.
07
Customer
Gain a 360 View of the
Customer
Combine data from your CRM, the IoT
and even customers’ social media posts
to gain a holistic view of who they are
and what they do!
Example:
Red Roof Inn hotel chain analysed public
data sets to track weather conditions
and flight cancellations at local airports.
Knowing that 90,000 passengers were
stranded daily due to cancelled flights,
they targeted individuals searching on
mobiles for nearby accommodation.
This increased business by 10%!
Intelligent Customer
Service
Use what you know about your customer
to offer them an individualised service
that focuses on delivering what they
need as quickly as possible.
Example:
eBay’s ShopBot provides intelligent
suggestions based on customer prompts.
A prospect could send the bot a photo
with the inquiry “I like these summer
shoes, do you have anything similar?”
and the bot will rapidly deliver a list of
similar products! It also “remembers”
you. It can keep track of your shirt size
or the brands you like, so it won’t keep
suggesting Nike when you prefer Adidas.
It uses machine learning, predictive
analytics, real-time storage and
processing as well as natural language
processing.
08
Recommend, Up-Sell
and Cross-Sell with
Confidence
Predict user preferences based on past
purchases to personalise cross- and
up-sell.
Example:
In 2009, Netflix gave away a $1 MILLION
PRIZE to the person or group that came
up with the best algorithm for predicting
how customers would like a movie based
on previous ratings.
The company estimates these
algorithms give them $1 BILLION A
YEAR from customer retention.
Predictive Churn
Modelling
You can use customer journey analytics
to find those particular touch points that
prove to be an obstacle in the customer
journey, putting customers at risk of
churning. Or identify potential ‘churners’
before they reach the point-of-no-return.
Example:
American Express uses historical
transactions and 115 variables to forecast
potential customer churn.
They can identify 24% of accounts (in
the Australian market) that are going to
close within four months.
09
Customer
Social media analysis and
response
Monitor what your customers are
saying about you at scale and respond
appropriately.
Example:
Tesla used historical social media data to
analyse the conversations around electric
vehicles and competitors in Mexico, a
market they were looking to break into.
This allowed them to tailor their brand
messaging around key online topics
that met the core concerns of their
prospective clients in the new market.
Data-Driven Product
Development
Engineering time is too valuable to be
wasted on iterations of products that
have not been validated at all.
Gather operational data reflecting
product performance, diagnostic data
recording product behaviour or data
indicating feature usage. This can form
the basis for continuous improvement
of existing products, as well as for
input to innovation and new product
development.
Example:
The popular coffee-house chain
Starbucks uses big data to determine
whether setting up a branch at a
particular location would be fruitful. This
decision is based on information like
location, traffic, area demographics and
customer behaviour.
This assessment helps Starbucks to
make nearly accurate estimates of
success rates and thus choose locations
based on the propensity toward
revenue growth.
10
Security and Risk
Fraud Detection Cyber Threat Intelligence
Predictive analytics and machine Use analytics and machine learning to
learning capabilities can provide detect unusual patterns in device or user
automatic alerts if it recognises a pattern activity.
that matches any known fraud schemes.
Example: Example:
The National Health Service (NHS) In the digital space, online ticket
recently deployed a new analytics exchange StubHub has reduced online
infrastructure that has allowed it to fraud by 90% after implementing an
identify roughly £100 million in potential analytics-based detection system.
savings following a reduction in benefit
fraud and the risk of human error.
Near-Real-Time Risk Analysis
Poor risk analysis was one of the major factors underpinning the financial
crash of 2008. Big data stands to enhance the quality of risk management
models by simulating many scenarios to realise all the potential risks
associated with any given course of action, e.g. transactions, investments etc.
Example:
Singapore’s United Overseas Bank use a risk management system that uses a high-
performance analytics solution that combines grid computing, matrix-based calculations and
in-database analytics to streamline the calculation of the total bank risk.
The solution reduces risk calculation time for the bank from 18 hours to a few minutes.
11
Need to Accelerate We can help you to accelerate strategic digital
transformation projects while upskilling your
teams in modern, cloud-native ways of working

Your Digital
Transformation? Find out more: contino.io

12 13
Big Data Architecture:
Travel Company Data from discrete siloes is brought together into a single data lake in AWS, where it is cleansed and
transformed. It’s queried by a combination of Apache and AWS tools, before insights are collected and
visualised using Tableau.

The insights are then used to inform powerful personalised marketing campaigns to drive effective
cross- and up-selling campaigns.

Multiple Data Data Processing

Sources Data Warehousing

Adobe Analytics
AWS Relational AWS Redshift
Database Service

Data Cataloguing
Insights &
Extract: Preprocessing: Data Lake Visualisation
Daily batch Transformation
NPS Scoring upload & cleansing AWS Glue
Data Querying

INSIGHTS Tableau
Raw data AWS Lambda Analytics-ready data GENERATED

AWS Athena Apache Spark Apache Hive

Reporting Systems

AWS Elastic Apache Zeppelin

Outcome:
MapReduce Personalised ‘Next Best
Core Customer Destination’ marketing
Data Handling campaign
Data (who is
travelling where at
what time)
AWS Lambda AWS Step
Functions

14 15
Big Data Architecture:
Travel Company A highly-scalable, fully-automated, cloud-native data analytics platform on AWS. It features
sophisticated data analysis and machine learning with AWS Sagemaker and a customisable, near
real-time data dashboard.

The new platform provides visibility of activity across the company’s whole transport network in
near-real-time, enables predictive responses to delays, bad weather and public events as well as
personalised customer engagement.

Extract Load Transform Action Use Cases

Real-Time
Passenger
Executive
Data
AWS Lambda AWS Kinesis AWS Lambda Decision-Making
Firehose Tableau

OpenData Real-Time
Snowflake Virtual Warehouse
Transport Planning
AWS Lambda and Response

Real-Time
Weather Data Analysis
Data
AWS Lambda AWS DynamoDB AWS Sagemaker Jupyter Notebook

16 17
Big Data Architecture:
Education Organisation A highly scalable and actionable data insights platform that facilitates actionable business intelligence,
driving targeted enrolment, agent and retention strategies.

It enables the organisation to generate insights on the lifecycle of international student applications and
enrollment from multiple data sources using AWS native tools and services.

Multiple Data
Sources

Insights & Visualisation

Student
Enrolment System
Use Cases
Extract Data Cataloging Data Querying

Tableau Targeted Student

Student Enrolment Strategies
Admissions
Raw data AWS Lambda AWS Glue AWS Athena
Student Enrolment
Planning
AWS
Quicksight
Student Marketing & Socio-Economic
Recruitment System Modelling
AWS DynamoDB

18 19
How to Get Started with
Big Data
Big data can be scary. Companies have piles of
data. They don’t know what to do with it. And it
just gets bigger and bigger.
Here are our starters for ten.
1 Work out what you want
Are you trying to understand your
business better? Or perhaps it’s
knowledge of your customer that is
lacking. Or seeing how different data
sets fit together?
2 Collect it in a central place
(in the cloud)
Enterprise data is siloed across the
business. In order to do comparative
analysis (which is where the moolah
is at!), it must all be in one location.
3 Cleanse your data
Do you have data you haven’t looked at
in ten years? (We’ve seen it!)
Make it consistent. Strip out the foreign
characters. Get rid of decimals. Make it
all machine-readable.
4 Build an analytics platform
(in the cloud!)
Cloud-native tools will give you
everything you need for 80% of data
workloads. The results from that 80%
will be enough to get the support
needed to go after the remaining 20%!
5 Visualise your data
Your boss LOVES dashboards. We
guarantee it.
6 Translate the findings to the
business
This is the cultural element. Once your
data ducks are in a row it’s what you do
with the insights that matters! Ensure
the business can take meaningful
actions with what you have found.
20
On The Importance
of Being Cloud-Native
The cloud lets you go full big data.
An on-premises platform is slow, monolithic and
takes months to add additional compute.
But it’s not just that the cloud is better, faster and
cheaper (although it is that, too).
With the cloud you can scale from zero to 1000s Ultimately, the real benefit of the public cloud
of servers faster than you can say “Hadoop”. is that it allows you to bypass years of legacy
Then just turn it off when you’re done! technology, processes, thinking and culture.
You can add new services without having to wait You get a chance to completely modernise and
months for procurement! reinvent how you work.
With everything in a central data platform in the And if you want to go big with big data...that’s an
cloud you also get all the benefits of putting your absolute must.
disparate data sets together. You can:
• Run them in parallel
• Query them against each other
• Start, stop or scale at the push of a button
• You can do this even when processing
petabytes of data
You can’t do that on-prem!
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Case Study:
Contino Helps Jetstar
Move to a Fully-Enabled
Data Insights Platform
The Challenge
Jetstar had been relying solely
on a traditionally structured
data warehouse for its analytics,
insights and decision making,
which was not capable of
handling the volume, variety or
velocity of some of its valuable
data sources.
The Results
The platform has helped Jetstar better understand their customers’
preferences and provide them with more relevant destination
recommendations. This has resulted in a better customer experience and
higher conversion rates.
The Solution
Contino deployed a data lake
platform to enhance their
data handling and processing
capabilities, enabling Jetstar to
produce insights from data sets
that were previously not fully
accessible.
22
Conclusion:
Daunting Data
There’s so much to big data, but it shouldn’t
be daunting.
The principles are straightforward - it just requires
some elbow grease to get it off the ground.
But it’s not a magic bullet by itself!
Like its historical analogue, oil, it’s only useful if you
use it to fuel something.
It’s what you do with the insights that matters.
Contino has helped some of the world’s largest
brands to build customer-obsessed data strategies
and cloud-native analytics platforms.
You already have the answers you need in your
data. We can help you to turn those vast data siloes
into happy customers through the use of cloud-
native approaches.
23
What We Do
We Support Our Customers Across Five Core Pillars
Cloud Platform Build
& Migration
We provide safe, repeatable,
scalable and cost-effective
‘enterprise grade’ build and
migrations to cloud platforms.
Cloud Native Software
Development
Contino helps companies move
to cloud-native architecture and
software development practices
in order to accelerate time to
market and organizational agility.
Enterprise DevOps
Transformation
Contino helps regulated
customers leverage game
changing approaches to
software delivery and IT
operations at speed and scale.
Data Platforms
& Analytics
Contino builds big data and
analytics platforms for
organizations by leveraging
cloud across pillars of risk,
scale, agility and reliability.
Our Clients
DevSecOps &
Cloud Security
Contino helps our clients
improve and modernize their
approach to IT security, shifting
application and platform security
concerns earlier in the
development lifecycle.
300+ People
5 Global Offices
200+ Engagements
$70m USD Funding
London New York Atlanta
london@contino.io newyork@contino.io atlanta@contino.io
Melbourne Sydney
melbourne@contino.io sydney@contino.io

contino.io continohq contino