Data Lake Analytics in the Cloud for Better Customer 360

Zaloni® was selected by Etihad, a large global airline conglomerate, to build and deploy a managed, governed cloud-based data lake using Zaloni® Arena DataOps platform to deliver a full view of enterprise data across systems and networks, and provide business users with broader, controlled access to data for agile analytics and to support their customer 360 initiative.

Challenge: The company owns significant equity in a number of alliance partner airlines and needed to integrate and match large volumes of soiled data across multiple alliance partner airlines, systems and networks, to create Customer or “Golden” Master Records. These “golden” records provide an enriched view of customer data which can be used to personalize and improve customer experience with booking, check-ins, baggage handling and more. 

Solution: Etihad built and deployed an enterprise data lake analytics platform using Arena which allowed the company to ingest data from numerous sources, ensure data security through Arena’s governance capabilities and improve efficiency through operationalized workflows. Arena’s machine-learning data matching engine automated the capture and combination of complex data types. Arena’s data mastering uses Spark-based machine-learning libraries and analytic approaches to integrate data silos, even in the absence of unique identifiers from operational systems. These approaches include probabilistic matching for record linkage, and advanced data clustering and data classification techniques. Arena data mastering also uses reinforced learning techniques that enable the company to train the matching models based on live sample data. This “training” provides maximum accuracy that may be adjusted as data changes over time. 

Results: Arena has allowed Etihad to successfully integrate, manage and govern its complex data ecosystem to build golden records that support its customer 360 initiative. Arena has reduced nearly all time wasted in data acquisition, and automated ingestion reduces time wasted on refreshing data. Arena’s implementation has created productivity gains in analyst time and provided key insights on market activity that enabled more focused selection of campaign target audiences, resulting in better conversion rates.