Razorsight Launching NCloud-Based Predictive Analytics Solution

MapR Technologies, Inc. announced that Razorsight Corp., a provider of cloud-based predictive analytics solutions, is using the MapR Distribution including Hadoop, along with Apache Spark, to take advantage of big storage and compute.

Razorsight evolved its technology stack with Hadoop from MapR to scale cost effectively and to generate valuable insights using data science and predictive analytics for communications service providers.

“We selected MapR for several reasons. First, having the flexibility of the full Spark stack as part of the Hadoop distribution was very important. Second, MapR provided production-class Hadoop with enterprise support. And third, the NFS gateway was critical for us to integrate ingestion and data flow pipelines with HDFS for easy, high-speed access,” said Suren Nathan, CTO, Razorsight.

Razorsight uses MapR to build a central data lake as a primary data store for both online and archived data. Since the launch of this new stack in late 3Q14, the production cluster has received, processed and analyzed more than 40TB of telecommunications service provider and industry data, which includes data generated from the mobile devices, mobile, fixed and cable networks, content providers, Internet of Things, broadband applications and VOIP. Razorsight leverages the MapR NFS gateway to move these data sets in and out of the cluster, making it easy and intuitive to integrate Hadoop into the overall data flow. Razorsight then uses Spark as an in-memory processing engine to enrich and transform the source data to prepare the analytical records for advanced modeling. Additionally, Razorsight’s end-users and business analysts continue to use existing business intelligence and visualization tools on their downstream data warehouse.

Enables new telecom solutions
The platform has enabled Razorsight to expand into solution areas for its telecommunications service provider customers. For example, Razorsight’s sales and marketing solution is designed to improve the customer experience, reduce churn and identify the next best offer. The marketing team at Virgin Mobile Latin America has deployed Razorsight’s sales and marketing solution in multiple countries to support its expansion there. Razorsight’s predictive analytics will help them tailor targeted marketing campaigns based on a particular customer’s propensity to churn.

“Our technology stack is one of our major differentiators. Our customers trust us with their data, and our ability to geerate accurate and reliable predictiveinsights in the fastest possible timeframe,” said Nathan.

With their previous architecture, Razorsight ran into multiple bottlenecks because data ingestion, processing, analytics, querying and visualization were all competing with each other for processing power. Now with the MapR platform, they can completely separate these, making an impact on performance and scalability.

The MapR architecture also accounts for a huge cost savings.

“The total cost of storage and processing for a traditional enterprise EDW platform is about $15,000-20,000 per terabyte. With the Hadoop ecosystem, this has dropped to about $2,500-3,000 per terabyte,” explained Nathan.