With the Internet-enabled mobile device market continuing its rapid growth, U.K.-based mobile payment company Bango Ltd. decided to retool its data analytics capabilities by integrating an app from Toronto-based Infobright Inc.
Tim Moss, chief data officer at Bango, said his company launched the Infobright Enterprise Edition app late last year after testing an open source version of the software for several months. The need to scale up its business in the growing mobile payment market and provide a more comprehensive analytics engine for its customers was the driving factor for the company’s decision.
“The main area Infobright will help us is in the mobile analytics product line,” he said. “We’re storing more and more data every day and getting more customers on-board.”
Susan Davis, vice-president of marketing for Infobright, said that while many databases can deliver a fast query performance against large volumes of data, they often require a tremendous amount of work on the part of IT. She said much of this work involves creating indexes and partitioning data.
“Bango wanted the performance, but they didn’t want to limit the kind of questions customers want to ask,” she said.
For Moss, the ultimate goal was to give customers a Web-based interface that was flexible and quickly delivered back the data customers were requesting. He said the biggest compliant from Bango users prior to launching the Infobright functionality was query response time.
Another area of concern for Moss was the growing demand from customers who wanted to run increasingly complex and different types of reports. Each additional analytics search query would force Bango to add more indexes, which typically increases storage demand and decreases performance time.
“One important report to our big media customers was the average length of time that mobile users were spending on their site or sections of their site,” Moss said. “That could give them an indication of how long people were reading information on their site and where to focus efforts for how to optimize their site.”
He added that Bango customers were also increasing interested in mobile device manufacturer, model, and operator information.
Moss said these types of queries were “extremely difficult” to for Bango while it used Microsoft’s SQL server, with performance very slow on small volumes of data.
“Previously, we had to add further tuning and indexing the different angles that customers want in order to slice and dice their data,” he said. With Infobright, Moss added, these parameters can be added right into reports easily.
Infobright said an ad hoc Bango report that would cover five million events took 11 minutes to run on SQL Server, as opposed to 10 seconds with its analytics app. As for data compression numbers, Infobright said data that requires 450 GB of storage on SQL Server could be compressed down to 10 GB.
Bango customers include EA Mobile, FOX Mobile Group and World Wrestling Entertainment.