Summary

The client provides targeted marketing powered by billions of consumer data points. They help their clients acquire new consumers, manage CRM and optimize campaigns. Custom-built client solutions help optimize campaigns, provide real-time scoring of data sets, or drive brand awareness. They leverage a cooperative database which integrates data from a large network of marketing partners, with customer data updated monthly.

Client Challenges

The marketing agency needed to transition from operating in SAS 9.4 into SAS Viya 3.5 and run in Google’s Cloud Platform

The client was experiencing performance strain when running the monthly base line models, which was negatively impacting the “Business As Usual” operations performance.

The client loads their data into Hadoop and use an ETL process to retrieve predictors and pass them into SAS Viya as structured data sets for analytics. Each data set includes anywhere from 10,000 to 14,000 candidate predictors for use in the modeling process.

The following was needed in order to transition operations from SAS 9.4 into SAS Viya 3.5 running in Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP):

  1. Refactor the SAS workload into a container to make it extremely portable into the cloud.
  2. Isolate the monthly base line models.
  3. Accelerate the time to move a 2TB data set from 14 days to less than a day.

Stratacent's Solution

Stratacent’s solution streamlined operations and optimized performance. The benefits to the business included a decrease in model run times from 14 days to 4 hours. Stratacent increased the performance of the Business as Usual (BAU) daily operations. There was no impact to BAU daily operations while the monthly baseline was running.

Summary of Stratacent’s Solution:

    1. Designed and deployed a containerized solution that runs effectively in GCP.
    2. Containerized the Model workload for the monthly base line models.
    3. Leveraged GCP disk utilities to expedite the migration of the 2 TB data file.
    4. Greenfield Viya 3.5 Cluster in GCP for BAU operations.

Results

Streamlined operations and increased database performance for Business as Usual operations for a marketing consulting agency.