Mastering the "core" of large data to achieve precision marketing

As a business person, you may have to travel by air frequently. If one day, when you sit on the plane, in the absence of any prior request, a smiling stewardess will be a cup of fresh green tea in front of you, you must not be surprised. Because by sorting and analyzing your previous flight information, the airline will be able to understand the various preferences of your flight and provide you with attentive service. This is not a myth. According to the reporter understand, some domestic airlines are carrying out this research, hope that through the fine analysis of passenger data to achieve precision marketing, and to provide personalized services for travellers, China Oriental Airlines Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Oriental airline) is one example.

Data analysis is the bridge of business transformation

In recent years, Oriental Airlines is implementing business transformation: From the passenger part, Oriental Airlines is transforming from the traditional carrier to service integrator; from the freight part, Oriental Airlines is transforming from the traditional air transport business to the aviation Logistics enterprise. Eastern Airlines believes that the aviation industry and the information industry have the same place. Orient Airlines aims to become an integrated service provider, with partners to build an ecological circle, to provide passengers with the full travel support services. Therefore, the development of Informatization has played a very important role in promoting the business transformation of Oriental Airlines.

Oriental Airlines has elevated the analysis and application of large data to a strategic level. The airline industry is increasingly focused on electronic ticketing, online marketing and the promotion of passenger experience. Through the tracking and analysis of VIP customer behavior data, airlines can provide better quality, comprehensive and close to customer service, and to achieve this must rely on information systems and data mining system quality improvement.

The leader of Oriental Airlines has long proposed to achieve precision marketing and personalized service to travellers, and large data analysis is the prerequisite to achieve this goal. As early as 2010, Oriental Airlines set up a unified passenger database, all the relevant information of passengers are included in this system. For the needs of business development, in the past few years, Oriental Airlines has been a number of mergers and acquisitions in the industry, such as the acquisition of Shanghai Airlines, China and other airlines. After the merger, Oriental Airlines need to integrate the information systems and application systems of many companies, and form a unified platform to lay the foundation for the data exchange between the systems. For Eastern Airlines, it urgently needs to build an open, scalable IT infrastructure platform. As the core of the IT infrastructure platform-processor provider, Intel's goal is to help customers build an open platform. This coincides with the demand of Eastern airlines. "Our goal is not only to discuss the development trends of large data, but also to work with partners to help Chinese enterprise users discover the great value of their large data sets," said Dr He Jingxiang, general manager of Intel Asia Pacific Research and Development Ltd., Intel Software and Services Division, China. and grasp the great opportunities that these great values can create. ”

"The data volume of the passenger database is growing very fast, and the workload of collating, analyzing and cleaning the data is very great," said Zhenghong, general manager of Oriental Airlines Information department. With the further deepening of business transformation, Oriental Airlines not only have to do their own passenger database system, but also to integrate their own systems with the main partners of the system to achieve smooth data exchange. At present, we are doing research work in this field. ”

High performance, easily scalable large data platform

From data collection to data analysis, data is transformed into information, which in turn shows its intrinsic value, including business value and social value, which is a difficult transformation process and cannot be achieved overnight. Intel believes that to better exploit the value of large data, it requires the introduction of innovative technologies in the relevant IT infrastructure and service tiers, data organization and management, data analysis and discovery, decision support, and IT services, especially in the IT infrastructure and service layer, which is a large data application carrier, based on an open architecture platform.

In addition to individual key applications, Oriental Airlines has moved most of its applications to the x86 server platform. In the future, Eastern Airlines ' cloud computing and large data applications will also be built on an open architecture. Zhenghong said: "The original application of Oriental Airlines most of the operation on the small machine, but now can be transferred to the x86 platform applications are transferred to the x86 server platform." However, some applications, such as those introduced from abroad, remain on small machines. "Standardized, open, easy to expand, high-performance x86 platform has become the core of the IT application of Eastern Airlines skeleton."

At present, Oriental Airlines has more than 80 Dell PowerEdge R910 servers. The virtualization applications of Oriental Airlines are built on the Dell PowerEdge R910 4U Rack Server platform. The company currently deploys three virtualization systems, one for production environments and two for testing and development environments.

The Dell PowerEdge R910 server uses the Intel Xeon MP E7520 processor, primarily for data centers, to support mission-critical applications with high performance, reliability, and I/O scalability. Referring to the principle of the procurement server, Zhenghong said: "The overall cost of the server is the most important factor we value." As we continue to purchase servers, the service capabilities of the server vendors are also valued. From the business point of view, we are very concerned about the security and reliability of the server, will not blindly pursue the adoption of the latest technology or products. "The Intel Xeon MP E7520 Processor is designed to take full account of the user's reliability requirements." The Intel Xeon MP E7520 processor features Intel's high reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features, with remote IDRAC6 connectivity and embedded diagnostics, and its dual built-in SD modules provide virtual machine hypervisor-level failover capabilities. This is a reliability feature designed based on direct feedback from Dell customers.

Eastern Airlines ' data is divided into internal and external data. The internal data mainly includes the passenger information of Oriental airlines, the operation and the auxiliary decision information, which is mostly structured data. After years of accumulation, these data have become very large. "We need to analyze these historical data to find out what customers like and how valuable they are to orient Airlines," he said. "Zhenghong said. For large business data that still requires relational databases and business intelligence technologies and applications to process and analyze, Intel is supported by the Xeon processor E7 family of products. The advantage of the E7 product family is the ability to provide a platform with performance, energy efficiency, RAS characteristics, and cost-effectiveness advantages for business-critical business applications, especially for key business data processing and analysis tasks. Oriental Airlines is the beneficiary of Intel Xeon E7 processor products.

External data analysis mainly refers to the seemingly disorderly new media data, such as the Internet, Micro-blog, forum data analysis, to find those to improve the quality of service, promote marketing helpful information. However, this is only a vision of Oriental Airlines, is currently being evaluated, has not been formally implemented. The biggest difference between the large data analysis and the traditional data analysis is that the traditional data analysis is mostly aimed at the structured data, one is the data quantity is small, the other is the data type is relatively simple, the third is the real-time requirement of the analysis is not high. But the big data is mostly unstructured data, such as the new media data that Eastern airlines values. Large data is not only very large, but also the real-time processing of data requirements are very high, which requires the IT infrastructure not only to have flexible scalability, but also to have high performance. And that's the advantage of Intel's big data platform.

Intel's primary mission is to build the "core" of big data. For example, the Intel Xeon Processor E5 product family provides better performance, energy efficiency, scalability, and manageability for distributed processing and high-performance computing tasks in large data applications. In response to the challenges of large data, Oriental Airlines is also actively adjusting and optimizing the original IT Support architecture. Zhenghong said: "We in the hardware and software and other aspects will have a relatively large adjustment." At present, one of our data Warehouse projects has completed the tender work, there will be a series of new procurement. "Choosing an open architecture is a principle that Oriental airlines insists on.

Continuously deepen the application of large data

The current major data applications of Oriental Airlines include: Market research data, micro-blog and other new media content data, call center collection of product information, website and partner website Collection of user network behavior information. Zhenghong said: "These large data on the server's performance and storage space are very high requirements." At present, Oriental Airlines has launched an enterprise-class Data Warehouse project, large data application is an important part of the project. We consider using the software and hardware as a technology platform in this project. The technology platform adopts the parallel processing architecture of integrated optimization processing, and the processing ability and efficiency of large data will be greatly improved. At the same time, because the optimized data compression technology is adopted in the scheme, the compression ratio of large data can reach 1:10 or even 1:15, so the problem of the limited storage space of large data is solved well. ”

In fact, Oriental airlines in the past a long time in the local data analysis of the work. The new Data Warehouse system will be a relatively independent analysis system. After the new Data Warehouse is established, the data analysis work in the past will be migrated to the new Data Warehouse system. The original hardware used for data analysis will be replaced by one, and the old hardware devices that are replaced will be used for development and testing.

Eastern Airlines used to compare the impact of large data on business by comparing the examples of foreign airlines. Zhenghong said: "Big data really can promote the development of airline business." For example, large data analysis is essential for accurate marketing of high-value travellers. Many airlines now have a clear definition of high-value travellers, and some just rely on the number of passengers or points to determine the value of the airline. If the use of large data analysis tools, we can accurately determine the level of passenger value, such as some passengers, although not many times, but each flight to the airline's contribution is very large, such passengers should become a VIP customers. With a large data analysis tool, we can be targeted to achieve accurate marketing, for the timely recommendation of the tourist products they need. ”

Responsible Editor: Sun Shanshan