Challenge

IBM’s customer was operating a suite of local market solutions to manage its products, its consumers, and the marketing campaigns associated with those products. The customer had software that handled most consumer interactions with the brand, including social network interactions, marketing offers, voucher generation, and product utilization. Field marketing personnel were also using specific solutions to engage new consumers, through registrations at events and following up with conference delegates.

Working closely with IBM, the customer realized there was an opportunity to merge those segmented functions and solutions into a unified global platform. The vision was that a unified environment would provide superior consumer engagement, global analytics, and a consistent user experience. All of this would result in faster go-to-market for its next-generation products.

Solution

In developing a solution architecture to fit the brief, the IBM team knew that they needed to develop a unified platform that had truly global reach, performed to requirements, and was scalable and highly reliable. The integrated architecture had to meet the requirement for scalable data storage while also providing a suitable environment for performing deep analytics on the stored data.

IBM determined that the Apache Cassandra® NoSQL database would be the platform architecture’s key technology to deliver the requirements of scalability, performance, and high availability. Apache Spark™ was also identified as a key technology. The Cassandra Lucene Index plugin for Apache Cassandra was chosen as the most effective solution to provide low latency search string capability while integrating with Cassandra.